One gaunt, in mdl format. It looks like the scale's been preserved correctly. I basically used that 3D exploration program to convert the map to dxf, and imported that into QMe. The main problem was that .map files don't have the internal surfaces culled like .bsp files do. So at first the model had over 600 polys, as if you'd made each brush a seperate func_wall, so all the backfaces remained. But a little bit of surgery and the model's left with just over 300, not quite the count you were after, but it's easily alright for quake.

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/gaunt.zip

As for my model, I can see why it needs a more quakey skin, but none of the attempts I made worked out too great. Unless I get very inspired some time this week, I'll probably just convert it for prydon gate or something : - ) 

model skin coords... the wings would need to be seperate as well as the horns so that it could be skinned properly... 

necros: yes, the legs are skinny, as are the arms. I did those last because 1) I knew I'd find them harder to sculpt than anything else and 2) they're almost the least prominent parts of the monster's form ( I think the order of prominence runs: wings - head - tail - legs - arms - torso ). I kept them skinny to save polys a bit and because they weren't so important, but also becaue they are called gaunts...they're supposed to be skinny ;) But if they look wrong when animated, then they can be bulked a little without adding more polys.
The horns do form basically a straight edge along the front of the face....and in Pitch Black, they do curve inwards. That's also what Lovecraft's descriptions says. I forgot :/ That can be remedied.
It will get modelled. I'll have to wait 'til I get home to check Preach's conversion, but really besides the sculptural work and probably the skinning, it's Preach who's risen to this challenge; there's no way it'd even be worth my time trying this without Preach to actually make it happen. So not if - when it's animated etc. you will be coding it. Compromise is not an option. Escape is impossible. You will be assimilated.

zwiffle: I agree absolutely. Doing testmaps, I know the shambler's bbox will fit down a 96 unit corridor, but it's arms will clip into the walls. The standard/classic/generic corridor width of 128 units alleviates this. The gaunt model fits into a 128x128 doorway, but since it's going to spend most of its time flying - in fact, it's going to spend most of its time hovering - I doubt the mapper will need to fit it through many small spaces. Of course, there is always the greater likelihood of the gaunt flapping close to walls or pillars in pursuit of the player and sweeping its wings straight through the architecture. It may be possible to code it's movement to encourage it to give brushwork a wide berth, but that sort of playtesting is a bit away and...it's necros' problem anyway :P ( yeah, I'm still watching you, dude )

Preach: you are unstoppable. I love you :) 

looking at those horns, i can already envision a sort of melee attack where it attacks you like rhine would use it's horn or something... sort of fly/charges you and swings it's head as it closes...

also, the tickling as the gaunt holds you...
that's great! :P you should actually be able to see the tail move around under you as you're being held...

ok, i'm waiting for the model now. :D 

what about instead of using lightning for a ranged attack, the gaunt charges you like a fiend/lostsoul, physically hitting you with it's body? 

well, the Pitch Black creatures use their vertical blades with extreme vicousness to 'butt' their prey, shattering bone easily. That's not a bad idea. I suggested in the design brief that a conventional melee attack would be beneficial so it wasn't just a case of the lightning and occassionally the gauntdrop. As an actual replacement for the lightning or other ranged weapon I have reservations; having the gaunt move as fast as a fiend's longjump attack would bring it close to the player very quickly, which sort of defeats most of the advantages of having it fly. It also means that multiple gaunts in a combat situation are very likely to end up crowded round the player, their wings clipping into everything.
But I do know exactly what you mean about seeing the gaunt swoop suddenly at the player and strike with its gladiate head ( note: it's the vertical blades that act as weapons though; the horizontal horns contain its sensory organs. but whatever )
So code away. Too cool not to try :) 

jpg http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/gaunt/gaunt-wire-1.jpg
jpg http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/gaunt/gaunt-wire-2.jpg

I've done the hover and magic ( lightning ) animations. There's still more to do, including pain, death, swoop etc. But these are the 2 I thought would be longest and most often seen by the player. I'm actually getting the hang of qME now; I learned 4 new tricks with it today. So I whinged. I tried. I learned. I stopped whinging :P I'm actually pretty confident this monster is going to happen.
While experimenting ( read: furiously fux0ring ) with qME I was able to make the h_gaunt.mdl, the head used for gibbing.
I'm still having trouble getting the skin map sorted out, but the simplicity of the head model made skinning it a piece of piss. It's exactly the same polys as the one on the model...consistency is a good thing.
Here's a pic:
jpg http:/kell.vondur.net/monsters/gaunt/ss-gaunthead.jpg

necros: although not all the anims are there, you can start coding with the model now if you like. Besides, some of the animation may need to be based on specific forwardspeed values. So it would be better if I wait before doing them.

zip http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/gaunt/gaunt-model-1.zip

*hoot*[chirp] 

gibbed head model:
http://kell.vondur.net/monsters/gaunt/ss-gaunthead.jpg 

Making a nice skinmap for quake is by far the hardest part. The big problem is that to do one in the style of modern games requires a load of foreplanning. What I'd recommend for skinning the gaunt is to split the wings and head off, and create a skin frame where they aren't obstructed by the body.

To do that, make a copy of your model, that you'll only use for the skin. Select all the vertexes around the neck, split them. Do the same at the base of the wings. Then reconstruct all the objects from the base mesh

Then just move the head away from the body with the object tools, and the wings likewise, so that from the front view no parts overlap. Then run the skinmap wizard.

If you like you can mirror the wing onto itself, to save space on the skin, but that sort of thing can get messy. You could also mess around with the vertexes in the skin frame so that more faces are visible from the front, as long as you're careful with the ones you split at the start. Save frequently and good luck!

Oh, and when you've finished, animate the model with the copy you made earlier(You did make it, right?). That way you can export the frames from that one, and import them into the skinned version. By the magic of QMe it doesn't matter that the skinned version has had vertexes split, it'll import the frames anyway. 

don't have much to show yet... just basically got the model in the game and such...

one thing: the monster is facing the wrong direction, so when it turns to face me, it's back is pointed towards me, so you *may* want to fix that. ;) also, you have to promise not to change the order of the frames that are already completed... this causes a lot of hassle for me as the coder and is easily avoidable for the modeller.

cheers and good luck with the rest of the animations! :) 

i think it looks rockin, btw! the straight horns on the front look rather good ingame, although the bottom part has the texture really skewed...

if i might make a suggestion regarding the skin, perhaps you could try to do a q2 style skin for the head, by splitting up all the vertices so that you don't have to worry about stretched skin and such, plus you can get more detail into the head... i don't know too much about it though... :\
also, definatly go along with preach's suggestions. it will really benefit the model: you can see how the head part of the skin was also projected onto the part of the wings behind the head, for example :P

if you don't mind, i plan to use both the gaunt and the polyp in my next map! :D (plus the gug if it gets done!) 

wow, you wouldn't believe how much trouble it was just to get the stupid bastard to pick the player up and move around!

it took me like 6 hours for what you see here:
http://www.planetquake.com/necros/temp/gaunt01.zip

it's a pak file, the map is "gauntmap", no sounds, only regular scragg ones and the model faces the wrong way, but i swear that's not my fault! :D (oh yeah, the map is butt ugly again)

it's far from finished (the monster that is)... but i felt i should at least show what i got today, maybe that'll encourage you to finish the animations, kell. :D
basically, all it does is pick you up and fly around. it doesn't drop you, and can't attack any other way. plus it gets a little buggy if it doesn't pick you up on the first try as it starts to just float around... :( (will be fixed later)

to test it out, basically, just walk up forward so it notices you, then stand still. :P no really, it has a hard time actually hitting anything, but that's just cause it's not done yet. :)

problems that i don't think can be avoided:

-when the gaunt holds you, the view is very jerky. that's because the monster only gets refreshed every 0.1 seconds (and you can't change that without breaking stuff on slower computers), and i used setorigin to manually set the origin of the player underneath the gaunt, plus gravity still affects you, so even though i reset the player's velocity to 0 everyframe, you still start to accelerate down, so again, that contributes to the jerkiness.

-needs gaunt_corner entities to work. the way normal movetogoal (which is what all monsters that move use) works is it basically just heads towards the player until it hits a wall (then it goes into wall following mode) or it reaches the player. so obviously, that wouldn't work if the player is held directly beneath it. so when the thing grabs you, it just starts going to it's path corners (or in this case gaunt_corner). the mapper can put paths over lava, with a drop ent between so that it can drop at the right moment. i'll probably work on this a bit more so that it can go to _any_ gaunt_corner which is closest, instead of the first one of the list.


by contrast, the dropping player stuff and the lightning attack should be relatively simple to implement, and i'll probably get that done tomorow. plus i'll need sounds, and the rest of the model. :D

off to bed for me! cheers 

May I share with you a technique I discovered to get perfect skin mapping with Quake 1 models.

- First, make the model without worrying about skinmapping at this stage. When the mesh is finished, save a copy of the .mdl as an .md2 in QME.

- Import the .md2 into NST (Npherno's Skin Tool) for Q2, and create a new skinmap. As an example, here's a new skinmap for the Quake 1 knight I did:

http://photopile.com/photos/sloochyslooch/quakemisc/113135.gif

If your model already has a skin (like the Q1 knight), you can do a "retrofit" to the new skinmap, like this:

http://photopile.com/photos/sloochyslooch/quakemisc/113136.jpg

This can act as a guide as you paint over it to increase the skin resolution. I've started painting over the knight skin, as you can see, at 512x512 res, but I would reduce the skin to a 256x256 before using ingame:

http://photopile.com/photos/sloochyslooch/quakemisc/113137.jpg

- Finally, you need to convert your fully skinmapped .md2 model back into an .mdl to use in Quake 1. So far, QuArK 5 is the only tool I believe lets you do this conversion (qme does mdl->md2, but not vice versa, it seems).

I hope this has been helpful. 

and the skin is coming on good as well. 

Nice technique, if it works. (I have doubts about whether md2-style UV mapping will actually work in the mdl format.) Please post a screenshot of the finished model in quake, when you get a chance. I'd like to see it. 

making more headway. got the drop stuff worked out, so that leaves me with the lightning attack.

i wanted opinions on this one... should it be a no-evasion-besides-cover lightning attack, like the shambler, or a lightning attack that tracks a little behind the player, so if you are moving/strafing, you can avoid some of the damage like i did with the brown shamblers in nesp06 and 09? 

little behind. I hate Shambler's lightning. 

Yeah, the MD2 UV mapping can be done in quake, but you have to alter the model, so that seperated portions on the skin are seperate on the mode. Now, I've been spending hours doing this by hand, but it turns out that quark 5 does do this correctly and automatically, which is very nice to know : - ).

Also necros, you might wanna look at this inside3D thread when you're coding the lightning.
http://forums.inside3d.com/showflat.pl?Board=Inside3D&Number=17770&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5
It's not about whether the lightning is accurate or not(I agree with scampie though), but it is a rather nice visual effect, and I think it's quite portable too. 

While you guys are at it, how about making a couple more base set monsters, a runic set of monsters, and another zombie guy. I would appreciate it. Thx. 

Since base maps are much more popular than, well, you'd expect from the four maps in the original quake, I always reckoned that they could do with some variety. But the problem is trying to come up with something that's not just a grunt with a different weapon, as those are best done with a reskinned grunt. Also it shouldn;t be too Quake2-ish, as quake doesn't really go in for cybernetic stuff.
The only possible I had was to rip off the arco-flagellant:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/gamers_web1/damien.gif
as it's kinda like the grunts(chemically enhanced, and has a pacifier helm that sedates it until it's triggered, when the helm is lifted the thing goes bezerk). It'd be a melee creature for those base levels, which would make a change(fiend cameos excepted). Some kind of flying thing would be nice too, any ideas? 

The zombie as a cybernetic, symbiotic looking creature that rises from the green sewage but results so far are butt ugly as I haven't had the time lately to develop it further. Maybe that idea would be an easy one for someone to implement if they are looking for a base creature addition without the time factor of modeling something from scratch. 

a zombie that crawled around on the ground would be nice variety. it's attacks would be the same.. 

Well you could rip off Doom 3 and have a mechanical spider-head type monster. Then the player could put headless torso things around the stage, and the spider-heads would go them, attach themselves to it and use it as vehicle. You can't kill the torso itself, but if you damage it enough the spider-head will fall from it and won't be able to use it for a while. The only way to kill it is to shoot the spider-head while its not attached to a torso, but that brings about the problem of torsos falling into walls and not being useable, etc. If I come up with any more ideas I'll post em. 

 

Id ripping off Rodriguez who in turn ripped off (but at least credited) Heinlein who was probably visually inspired by Rider
who in turn was influenced by Shelly's Queen Maub.

Very Interesting, at least to me.