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. 

Can that model be anyhow attached to a Path_corner, or turned into a func_?

At least in quoth?

Btw that yesterday launcher freaked me out!
Cheers! 

the heck man, that thing is awesome! the only problem is that i can't think of where i'd want to use a vehicle like that. it would have to be some serious open terrain otherwise you'd just bump into sky brushes. :( 

ohhh well, maybe if you put a grunt or enforcer in it... and then put on guns. lots of guns. would be a cool unique monster. 

ohhh well, maybe if you put a grunt or enforcer in it... and then put on guns. lots of guns. would be a cool unique monster. 

It could also drop troops, or just do flyovers like in q2. 

Yeah, I'd never given thought to using it as an enemy but I think there's potential. You could probably adapt the skin into a Rubicon style thing fairly easy, if you rusted all the gunmetal bits brown and muddied the paint with more texture and the correct shade of green. Then it could compliment those enforcers on the hoverpads, ether as transport or gunship.

And yeah, it's possible to do Q2 style flypast animations in Quoth with one. Since func_rotate_train entities are non-solid, you can use a .mdl format external model for one and it's just a matter of creating the right path corner ents for convincing flight.

So, on to today's stuff. I posted a fair bit about it in this thread recently, so it'll come as no surprise that I'm about to post the Qexpo tutorial:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/the-return-of-the-qexpo-tutorial/
Well...I've still got 4 more to type up or recreate, but the first ones are restored. Thanks again to Madfox!

And what better model to go with it than the Fusion Cannon from tutorials 3 and 4, which I finally got round to finishing off during the downtime!
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/fusion-cannon/ 

I'm glad you got the tutorial back up. I remember reading that way back and i learned tons from it. 

The pace is maintained, another day, another model:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/blinds/

This time you can create some beautiful windows, and give the illusion that you aren't blocking vis through them. Amaze your friends with the obviously fake HDR effect they create.

Also the final four parts from the tutorial are up if you want to brush up on your animation technique or the essentials of the mdl format.
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/qexpo-tutorial/ 

I posted a new version of qmdl earlier this week. It turns out the merge_vertices function is worth running even on models that have come straight out of the md3tomdl converter. I ran it on my ogre model and it went from 692 vertices to 666. Not only is that a really cool number of vertices to have, but it's a pretty good saving to make. md3tomdl follows the topology of the md3 model exactly, so I'm guessing that there are places where vertices are separated due to subtle difference in smoothing groups. Once we get down to mdl format the fine distinctions are erased, and there's no reason not to merge the vertices.

I also discovered a bug in merge_vertices - it doesn't cope with framegroups correctly. So if you are going to add framegroups, for now you need to run merge_vertices first!

No new model today, but I've gone through and updated all the old models that had weird normals created by the old version of md3tomdl. The list of updated models is at:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/new-md3tomdl-qmdl-fbxtomdl-and-updated-models/
If you use any of the models in this post you should pick up the new version.

Also today sees a new version of fbxtomdl released which handles indexed skins in a simpler and more intuitive way(the same way that the helper in qmdl does). It's also got its own page now:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/qmdl/fbxtomdl