Another weird model today. Like the buttons it's part of the "more medieval models" effort; in this case it takes a previous base-style model, the forcefield, and creates a mystical version.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/07/26/runic-barrier/

The screenshot doesn't really do the model justice, as it's all about the animation. However, the animation itself is too long to make a gif for... 

cool! 

Another post from Preach, this time not a model but a tool update. It's v0.2 of the python module qmdl.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/qmdl/

There are some little tweaks to the mdl module, proper docstrings and breaking up a few methods to be more reusable. The biggest change is the addition of a "helper" object which disguises some of the complexity of working with the module. An example script which adds skins to the model would look like:

from qmdl.helper import Helper
poster = Helper()
poster.load ("poster.mdl")
poster.append_skin ("tintin.bmp")
poster.save()

It's basically something that's accreted from using the module for a while; I kept copy-pasting these functions into every file, then realised I needed to fix a bug in all of them and it was time to make a module... 

By starting an article in July and finishing it on August 1st, the article gets a publication date of 1st July!

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/skin-maps-for-mdl-format/

Oh, yeah, the article. This is a little history of how skin maps for .mdl files have changed over the years. So if you've ever tried to get your head around all the weird things .mdl format does with seams and backfaces, or you have a good grasp on front-back quake skins and want to understand how models with complex unwrappings work, then check it out. 

Really enjoyed this one preach, I plan on making some custom quake models so this info will be of great help!

If only I could get my brain around coding... 

Very good and informative read. 

I've asked for this before, but my previous version got broken and I lost the backup.

I can't install Qme 3.1 (.mdo support) on my 64 bit system - can someone zip their already installed version and upload it somewhere? 

Sock sent me his version, here's a link to it for anyone else who want s a copy (from my dropbox):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9d1t3p81q3v4yb/q1qme_3xdirectory.zip 

Yeah, the long awaited poster model is finally released properly:

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/poster/

Thanks to Ijed for contributing all those skins! 

So during the time that func_ was down, I got round to a spot of writing, and finally finished off that article on how normals work in Quake:

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/normals-in-mdl-format/

While doing this, I also discovered there is a bug in the md3tomdl converter, where it's incorrectly calculating the normal vectors of the MD3 file, and so is only using half the range of vectors. This explains why models like the ogre have appeared brighter in game than you'd expect. If you ignore the model on the right of each image

http://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/sidexside.jpg
shows the ogre's shading with the bug, and

http://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/sidebyside.jpg
shows the correct shading once the bug is fixed.

Once the shub-hub comes back up, I'll be uploading a new version of md3tomdl, and reupload all the affected models. So you'll probably want to download any models you're using again once that's done, and you should definitely get the new version of md3tomdl if you use it. 

Hi guys. Does anyone have a complete copy of the modelling tutorial I wrote back for Qexpo 2006? Archive.org has parts of it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070925005759/http://www.quakeexpo.com/booth.php?id=32&page=181

Sadly some of the pages are missing, although weirdly all of the tutorial images were archived. I didn't keep a local copy of the text, and thought it'd be nice to restore a copy to the live web.

So that this post isn't just a contentless appeal for help, I discovered a new thing involving QME and normals. You can turn on the lights in QME with the lightbulb icon, and then activate the torch to swing the light around, which lets you visualise how the shading is applied.

You might remember from the above blog post that QME overwrites the normals on a model. It looks like the moment that the normals change is when the file gets saved, so you can preview your smoothing in QME before that happens. 

I think I might have an archive but I can only check in 3 days. Remind me if I forget and don't get your hopes too high. 

I have the most pages on screenshot. 

tutorial

Thanks for the tutorial, Preach!
Very welcome starting quake models. 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/Q10Anivers_Preach_booth.zip 

Thanks for the help MadFox, it's great to have the tutorial back! I will try and nudge Spirit about his copy, just to see if I can escape having to retype everything as well. Knowing that it's not gone forever is a great relief, and I'll get it on the blog soon. 

I was enthousiast from the moment I saw it at Q10booth.

Thinking it still would be there on the Q10th booth later, was enough for me to copy all to my hard disk. And althought it's not pdf, I'm already glad to have some access to the most basics.

It is a valued tutorial for Quake1 modelling that has helped me a lot. Waiting for page8. 

Even if madfox hadn't been able to help me out with a zip of all the images from the tutorial, my dredging mission on archive.org would still have been a waste of time...On a search through my modelling folder for other things, I found a complete set of the original images! No text though, so it's the moment of truth now. Spirit: do I need to type the missing tutorials from the images? 

So time for a little run of models to celebrate the return of the Shub-Hub! I've prepared a little stockpile, but quite a few of them aren't much use to mappers, and this first one is one such model. It's a grenade launcher variant which has issues in engines with interpolation (although fitzquake neatly avoids the glitches in this case). So I guess it might be valuable as a lesson of what not to do!

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/grenade-launcher/ 

I was so excited to post a useless model that I forgot the best part of the post. The model comes with a qmdl script that you can use to fix the normals on models with complex skin maps which you have edited in QME. It uses some heuristics to determine which vertices are "meant" to be joined together, then unifies the vertices' normals. Cutting QME out and preserving the genuine normals is still prefereable, but this gives decent results and keeps things simple! 

that is a wild looking grenade launcher O_o 

Yeah, the drum's quite heavy compared to the rest of the model, which makes the thing look a bit unwieldy to say the least. It's too long ago to pretend I remember what I was thinking when I designed it...

Although I'm going to try and spread the models out over the course of days, I will put up a tool update while I'm at it.

Here is the version of md3tomdl which correctly decodes the vertex normals on md3 files, and so gets rid of the overly-bright looking models the previous version created.
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/md3tomdl/
I'm gonna work through my models, reexporting them with this new version, and I'll share a link to the list of changed models once I'm done. 

cool, thanks for the update to the converter! been using that a lot lately! 

Time for another model and another update to one of the tools. Today we have a stake launcher (a la Painkiller). It's a bit of a weird design, but on the plus side it has a neat animation and a skin which kinda fits in with the palette of the classic quake weapons. Maybe if you've got a map with wide open spaces, you could swap the lightning gun out and include it as a sniping weapon.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/stake-launcher/

Today's updated tool is the qmdl module:

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/qmdl

Firstly the page has finally been fleshed out with a changelog and a proper examples page to get you started. Also v0.3 of the module is released, which has a very special extra function added to the Helper class: merge_vertices.

As the name suggests, it tries to merge as many vertices on the model as it can without changing the visuals (although it can be instructed that vertices with different normals are still mergeable). The feature I'm particularly proud of is that it will create seam vertices in order to perform a merge, if you have the correct front-and-back skinmap from a classic quake model.

It sounds like it wouldn't be useful very often but here's an example: Imagine you start with a classic quake mdl, and you convert it and import it into a modelling package. You add some animations to it then export it and convert it back to .mdl format. You probably had to export it via md3 or fbx, and so your end result now has a "complex skinmap", even though it doesn't use it in any way. This function will restore the classic skinmap, which I think is a first. 

No updates for tools today, I'm working on something but it needs more testing. As a change of pace from all these refurbished weapon models, here's a refurbished Helijet instead.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/09/12/helijet/

It kinda feels like the helijet really belongs to it's own mod, but I think it might be handy as a random mapobject as well.