Can someone explain to me why the Doom 3 and Quake 4 incarnations of Radiant are bad at handling complex brushwork?

I was reading over on kat's great site ( http://www.quake3bits.com/htm/tutorials/quake_4_editing_tips.php?subaction=showfull&id=1134661814&archive=&start_from=&ucat=13& ) that Quake 4 and Doom 3 don't handle trisouping well, so it's best to do it in another editor and import as an .ase or whatever.

After I read that, I thought of the issues I had with gaps in the brushwork when I tried making some manual curves in Doom 3 ( http://blitz.circa1984.com/curves.gif )

So, I guess what I'm asking is, why is it that the Doom 3 engine has such a hard time (at least in the editor) handling more complex brushwork like curves and trisouped brushes?

Don't be afraid to give me a fairly technical explanation if possible if anyone does in fact know the technical reason behind this phenomenon. 

what can i say more then

THKS

aguirRe and JPL

happy new year to u all :)

i promiss that in my next map i will surprise everybody... 

In most cases.

Trisouping with brushes doesn't work well for a few reasons. The most important is that smoothing will never occur between brush faces, whereas model and patch geometry can be smoothed. Due to the per-pixel lighting, seams between unsmoothed triangles will look hard and ugly, so trisouping will pretty much never be visually acceptable.

The second big problem is that for whatever reason DoomRadiant lacks the option to project textures axially on brushwork. That means angly brushes can't easily be aligned, which doesn't help the already fucked lighting on unsmoothed brush faces. Using models solves both those issues completely, and is a bit more performance friendly to boot.

Additionally because alpha blending can't happen on light interaction surfaces, blending needs to be controlled by vertex colour. There's no way to do this within DoomEdit, so if you want texture blending in d3 you have to use a model with suitable vertex colours painted in.

The circular brushwork in that shot doesn't look like it'd be problematic to me assuming everything is on the grid, although since smoothing will not occur on those brushes you will see seams. The editor preview sometimes suffers from sparklies that don't show up in game, and I suspect that's what is going on in that screen. I'd say that the d3 engine is actually more powerful when it comes to curved and complex stuff than any previous id tech, with the caveat that certain lighting conditions can make polygon-heavy scenes very expensive due to the performance-raping goodness that is stencil shadows.

To get the most out of the engine I suggest you use models or patches wherever possible for curved stuff. 

When doing trisouping, I've found that it's a really good idea to do it via dragging edges rather than vertexes. Vertex manipulation seems to be kind of unstable (in that it unnecessarily splits faces and sometimes just outright breaks them).

It seems counter-intuitive (or perhaps even impossible when first considered) to do trisouping with only edge-drag--at least it did to me the first time--but it's actually easier once you get used to it...

And yeah, if you want nice seamless (axially-projected) texturing on that surface, I'm pretty sure you're out of luck... 

models/patches are generally a better solution... 

Ok, I�ve got 3dsMax (and five years knowledge of it�s use) and want to try creating some bad guys for Quake 1. Where can I find a live MedDle (or equivilant) download link?

cheers 

I tried some monsters with Animation Master.
MAX3D sure will do, if you have the knowhow.

MedDle link seems to be broken. Only DOS version.
http://meddle.telefragged.com/
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2000/cs4455_spring/planetquake/modediting.html

Happy New Year! 

Create your monsters with MAX3D en export them
*.dxf or *.3DS to Qme.
This is a much better program to manipulate Quake1 monsters than MedDle! 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/meddle.zip 

...could some kind person make the original progs.dat discussion visible for me?

'View all threads' does nothing for me in IE6 or Green Browser. 

is it biodegradable? 

I tried Green Browser 'cause aguirRe had recommended it sometime ago as an IE alternative.

I just get a 'Cannot find server or DNS Error' when I click on View All Threads or News Archive.

I am trying to review the original Progs.dat thread as there are some things in there I want to try. 

If you find edge dragging difficult on trisouped brushes (as pjw mentioned above) try using 'quad'souping instead. Rather than use triangular block use square blocks which make edge draggin much easier and you can still get some pretty interesting 'terrain' shapes as well.

sock has a couple of tutorials on his site about quad souping (I thought I had them linked but haven't added them to the new version of meh site yet) 

works fine here in my GreenBrowser, you might be having local DNS issues. Func_ has been a bit reluctant lately, though. Very high latency and sometimes inaccessible.

Metl: The Chinese free biodegradable GreenBrowser has its name because it unlike most other Windows apps doesn't clutter your system at all. Everything is kept in one dir and works really well. Try it: http://www.morequick.com/indexen.htm 

I've never been able to View All Threads - I mean never as in never, ever, not nohow in any case ever, never.

I think I reported this once before. I think that's where your suggestion of GreenBrowser came from.

Can someone drag it to the Last 10 Posts area for me. Pretty please with sugar? 

Although I probably won't bother, is it possible to make Quake monsters in Max 7? Can you still export them to work in Meddle.

Hmm, maybe it has some legacy file exporters remaining? 

. 

yes.
to be more verbose, any app that can export to dxf format could be used in theory to make meshes. just make sure you hide any non-mesh geometry, like bones, helpers, etc when exporting.

i'd recommend QME3.0 though, but that's just because that's what i use. :P 

Thanks. 

Can you animate them in character studio (or whatever), or must you animate them simply by moving the vertices around? 

i personally don't use Character Studio, as i like to rig my meshes on my own and set up my helpers and IK the way i like (esp since often doing monsters for quake, the skeleton structure can be rather atypical)

afterwards, i just export each frame as a seperate dxf file (after hiding everything but the mesh) and then import each in sequence into QME.

remember to set the framerate to 10fps, so that when you preview your animations in max, it will be at the correct speed. (max defaults to 30) 

Pretty much cleared it up :D 

In my brief stint messing around with quake model animation, I exported a base from from qme in lwo format, imported into MilkShape, had to do some sort of transformation to get it to appear correctly (flip one axis I beleive), then rig a skeleton and animate. It's a pain in the ass that way, but once you have a good skeleton made, animation is easy (and fun). The quake enforcer looks odd doing the robot though. 

If you wanna make quake models using only free tools, the best combo I've found is making the model in gmax - mesh, skin and animations. Then export it to md3, load it in quark and export it to mdl. Gmax has a fairly decent setup for skeletal animation, it's not character studio but it's easier than any native Q1 tool. 

The reliable and also last known mirror of planetquake is now gone. ftp.sunet.se's idgames2 archive has been permanently deleted.

There are still some other idgames2 mirrors, but with far less content.