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. 

was never released AFAIK, and if it has then I want it. 

It goes without saying this model is awesome! There's plenty of attention paid to making it a good Quake model, like the way the idle animation is slightly exaggerated so that the imprecise vertex format doesn't detract.

However, I couldn't resist tinkering with the skin, as I've often thought the skinmap to the original knight was very wasteful. Not only is there acres of blank space, but the just-larger-than-powers-of-two width and height means it wastes 4 times as much memory in glquake-based engines. So here's Lunaren's model with a Widescreen skin...

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/models/knight-widescreen.zip 

I wanted to use original skins without having to do a lot of tinkering or splitting verts, but it did make for a 272x140 skin that would go up to 512x256 in GL quakes. my response to this was basically 'ehh fuck it' but preach found an elegant way to fix it. 

Widescreen fix? Sorry I dont understand how what you said above correlates with widescreen. 

It's a tongue-in-cheek way of saying the new skin is a lot more wide than it is tall. 

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.)

This is a very exciting concept. Wouldn't you still have to distribute the game code though? Or could you get round that by using darkplaces or something?

This model is FANTASTIC by the way... far better than the Capnbubs ones in my opinion. Somehow makes mowing down knights 10X as enjoyable. 

Re: original models looking bad. As well as being products of their time, let's also remember that this is what quake looked like for everyone playing it back then:

http://i.imgur.com/RrciHoJ.png

All monsters ended up as crude blobs of pixels anyway, so the dodgy texture mapping or janky modelling wasn't really gonna be scrutinised. 

True. Motion would be more apparent, though.

This model is FANTASTIC by the way

thank you! 

Cheers!