Oh I have to deal with Maya at work as well though we mainly use 3dsmax. Could be possible to convert it to FBX as well so that folks could reuse the anims on other critters too in any software that supports FBX. Ofcourse at that point the animation is baked flat with no nice rig you might have done inside Maya though.

Lots of custom Python you say? What madness did you do? :) 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60262&start=28&end=60 

it's easier now to just use Preach's mdl.py because it's an all in one thing. don't use the thing I linked. it's not there forget it 

I'd love to see a tutorial on this, I'm sure if I can map that I could make a half decent model... 

I HAD BROWSER PROBLEMS BEFORE SO I COULDN'T POST THIS BUT I'M POSTING IT NOW: THIS IS AWESOME.

AWESOME. 

I liked the pointy helm and sharp shoulders =\

But otherwise, nice. 

Actually the easiest thing these days is to simply export your model to FBX and then export it using Noesis to MDL format. I'm doing that for the Shambler remake and its a very straight forward process. My character has a full skeleton which is stripped out on export from Noesis and whatever texture you apply to it becomes part of the MDL. Nice custom UV's as well. 

It's shocking how bad the old model + anims are when you really look at them. 

I don't think so, actually. When you consider the tools they had at the time and where the state of the art was ... I think they did well enough. :) 

Very nice, still in the spirit of Quake. I did have to rename it PAK3 though. I have a PAK2 where I keep all of my transparent water maps. If I weren't so lazy I could probably get a bunch of newer mdls and combine them all into PAK2 (along with the prgs.dat that fixes the fish bug). 

it seems like we've got a pretty good collection of from-scratch replacement models that match the original quake aesthetic -- there's a player model, grunt, this knight, plus didn't sock make a new hell knight and some other models?

At this rate we might actually be able to have an open source content pack that can be distributed without copyright issues, and allow people to play custom maps without owning quake.

(i realize sound effects are still a huge hole in this plan.) 

and willem is right, Kevin Cloud's animation process was move verts, Save As, repeat. :( Skeletal rigging didn't really exist in 3D modeling packages yet. models like the Hell Knight show how much experience with the method he'd gotten by the end of the project. 

also, I think the knight was made early enough that they didn't even know how many polies they could get away with. 216 probably seemed like a lot. 

grey area as some are surely derivates. But one could try. Bethesda/id luckily(?) seems fairly ignorant on Quake. 

I recall the Knight and the horned Ogre were some of the first assets I saw (along with the Dragon), and they were in scenes with Doom textures, and Doom's tall fire sconces. 

I mean sure, it's a victim of its time and technical constraints, and it's not THAT bad considering those things, but still you can't really sat that the pointy-toes-of-death, nub handed, O.G. knight is not a good looking model. 

*can't really say
*is a good looking 

The knights and ogres were more a collaboration, sock provided the new models with new skins, and I provided the animations. 

/reminded

and yeah, blitz, the knight is still solidly in "a for effort" territory.

So with the knight/dog/ogre/player remade, what's the next worst model? The spawn? I'm not going to actually make it, I'm just curious. 

the next one might be vore. not because its animations are bad, but that it is flat out missing an idle animation.

the fish also had a bizarre bug in its death animation where the head becomes shrunk for no reason after the first frame. 

Wait there is a new ogre model? I have the Grunt, Dog and this new knight remake. What other treasures are out there??? :) 

it is flat out missing an idle animation.

Considering how many other models have unused animations, I'm pretty convinced they intentionally didn't give the Vore an idle anim.

Spiders don't wobble when they idle in real life either. 

And that blows! I would have liked a proper idle to make some better fidget anims or something. Yes I am redoing the Vore as well :P 

spiders are tiny 

If you want to make a drop in replacement for the vore, you can also do a framegroup for client-side idle animation.