Hi all, got a little model for the weekend here. It's a reworking of the nailgun model, where I was aiming to change three things:

1) Make the model interpolation friendly
2) Make the skin have power-of-2 dimensions
3) Nothing else

Grab it from here and let me know what you think. 

So yeah, after seeing the warning tape in MFX's map, I thought it was probably worth creating a more generic texture for the model. So here's a version which has standard yellow/black hazard stripes.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/hazard-tape/

To get the skin to look cleaner, I had to modify the way the skinmap works compared to the old model, so they can't be combined as a single file. In this way I justify a whole new blog post for a small cosmetic update : - ) 

I'd like to give the helijet a Rubicon 2 reskin, but the exported skin from qme is in pretty poor quality, and I can't even tell where an edge of the skin ends and the blank space begins. Do you perhaps have a better one laying around? 

I'd like to give the helijet a Rubicon 2 reskin, but the exported skin from qme is in pretty poor quality, and I can't even tell where an edge of the skin ends and the blank space begins. Do you perhaps have a better one laying around? 

use Qme to paint the triangles on the skin when exporting it.

Theres a button there in the UI. 

Quickest way to create a mask in QME is create a new skin (which makes it all black), paint white triangles as ijed says, and then export that skin. Bucket-filling the triangle interiors white is optional, you can usually just magic select the outside space at that point. Incidentally, not doing that is good for avoiding seams on your model, it's better to have a sensible colour - but don't forget to paint the pixel at (0,0) a different colour or it's all for naught! 

quark407 also has a method:
- open the model in quark407
- in the skins area, right click in the white area
- select copy
- right click again -> paste
- you get a new skin map skin
- right click the new skin and export 

That post yesterday reminded me of an article I had planned but never finished. It's a trick in QME which makes the Cut Away Unused Skin option more useful:

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/qme-skin-reduction-trick/ 

Preach! Tried to email you but btinternet apparently blows.

I'm working on a drop-in replacement for knight.mdl - one with the same anim lengths and moveforward offsets, but not a terrible mesh with terrible animation, so you can just put it in id1/progs and have a knight that looks as good as the Hell Knight without any progs code.

It means I've had to replicate even the weird stuff like the groaty 5-frame kneel where his feet lift up off the ground, because there are already mods that use those frames with their own built-in workarounds. My trouble (you might already have guessed what it is): id1 knight.mdl has 97 frames, but if you count the $frame definitions in knight.qc, there are only 96. attackb1 is duplicated as frames 43 and 44 - same name, same data. I'd expect this to screw up all the animations because of the one-frame offset it would introduce, causing incorrect frames to flash at the beginning of all the anims after it (walk and the two deaths), but it doesn't, so somehow Quake digests the model correctly.

My knight.mdl behaves fine in game when it doesn't replicate this bug, but it's then broken in demo playback (exhibiting the aforementioned phantom frames). When I do try to replicate it, exporting the same frame twice into the .mdl with the same name, I get a knight.mdl that musn't be bugged in quite the same way, because then I get the phantom frames during gameplay you'd expect. For this to be a 100% seamless id1 replacement, neither is acceptable.

You've spent quite a bit longer than me noodling around with the format. Any idea what makes the knight's stealth-duped frame special, and how to replicate the specialness? 

I don't know exactly what's going on there, it looks from a preliminary glance that it's the same pose repeating as attackb1 and attackb2 (although of course the frame names can be anything as the engine ignores them). So if you've tried making a 10 frame sequence and just repeating the first one to make it 11 long, then I'll have to investigate a little further. Leave it with me. 

This guy will be thrilled to hear about a new knight model. 

Post some screens over there (and here :) 

Thanks, Preach! :beer:

I'm not going overboard with the knight - it uses the old skin, and doesn't go any farther than good Quake level of detail lest it look out of place, so he's still got one flat quad for a face, but, you know, at least he has an entire quad for his face now :)

Sock was disappointed I didn't give him a nose though. 

Sock was disappointed I didn't give him a nose though.
*facepalm* Lunaran knight model! 

The facepalm that flattened his nose? 

Whatever e-mail glitch there is between us operates both ways, it seems.

I've had a little bit more of a poke around with the knight model and some tools. I took a look at the binary output for the first two frames of attackb, and also ran the model through my python loader so I could inspect how the parsed data turned out. I can't see anything too weird going on with the attackb sequence though - it looks like it's just a length 10 animation sequence, with the first pose duplicated to make the sequence 11 frames long. The engine doesn't actually care what you call the frames, either in demos or live gameplay, it just references them by numbers, so the only important thing is getting them in exactly the same sequence as the original.

Since I can't find anything weird going on, I'm worried that I've misunderstood the problem. Is it possible you can send me some attempted models to take a look at, and see if I can spot what's happening with them? 

It turns out I'm just a dumb idiot.


(short version: I was testing the knight out of /lunsp2/, since that's where all my model export stuff was already pointed and I am lazy, and at some point years ago I must have seen the duplicate $frame in knight.qc and "fixed" it, because I am proactive. The odd behavior was just a mismatch between gameplay in lunsp2 and demos recorded in id1, and had nothing to do with the model.)

Thanks, Preach! 

I made a decision to plunge into the wonderful world of 3D modelling.

http://i.imgur.com/R5G56tM.png 

Looks like a cross between the ripper and the flak cannon from Unreal! :) 

Oh God, now I wanna do a Q1 UT mod x_x
Sweet model! 

Is it possible to create the Chasm monsters and Weapons in the Quake Engine? 

Thanks.

Speaking about Chasm, I think I ripped off its energy crossbow, though I didn't realise it at the time.

I'm having some problems with UVs, by the way. I'm using QuakeForge Blender plugin and it seems to shift around coordinates in a certain way. At first I thought that it was a format-related precision problem, but when I tried to move affected coordinates in the opposite directions before exporting, I got ideal UVs on output. 

http://lunaran.com/pics/lunsp2/knight2.gif

This stupid run attack, man.

The knight calls ai_charge_side on every frame of his run attack, which calls walkmove(20). That's 20 in units. Trying to animate this guy doing a full-strength baseball swing while somehow moving his legs in a way that covers 200 units in 10 frames without the feet sliding is ... challenging, especially because it has to properly transition into run1.

That's the second pass and it still could be better. First pass I tried four strides of 50u each, which was a good length, but with only 11 frames to move his feet to all those positions, his legs were teleporting between very disparate poses and it was breaking persistence of vision, so he just looked crazy-Flintstones-bongo-legs.

Two strides of 100u each is way too long, and he just barely doesn't look like a flying ballerina if I turn his hips all the way to the side and have him twist and push off the very toe, but at least it reads properly as an animation this way, especially from the front where you'll usually be seeing it.

Plus, anything's better than the original knight, who as you can see hardly shuffles his feet forward at all in this anim and skates the whole distance instead. Also for a frame or two his head almost comes off. Also his feet are actually about four units off the ground for the majority of the anim. and so on.

It's close, though. I need to add some blend shapes to the rig to puff out the knees and elbows when they bend deeply, since they collapse pretty badly at extremes, but at that point I might call it done.

I'm trying to gather relevant skins also. So far I have stock, the Quoth beigeknight, and those two weird skins from ARWOP that make him look like a superhero. Any other prominent mods have prominent knight skins? 

Yeah, under the constraints I think you've done a fine job with the animation, makes it into a proper lunge. Also props for fixing the texture map on the sword, it always bugs me how much detail is lost from the knight texture through misalignment.

For skins, did Operation Urth Magik have tech-knights with lightsabres in it? Or was that just the hell knight model? 

It had two if I remember rightly.