http://quakeforge.net/ has a Blender plugin, taniwha is super nice and helpful in case it should not work. 

If you have Maya at home I've written some python doodads. They go through a hacked modelgen.exe atm but I'm planning on merging it with Preach's pymdl so it all works within Maya. 

The blender route seems the most sane at the moment ... I can still make the model in MODO and then just export/import into Blender and spit it out from there. I hope! 

Of course I'm totally biased toward blender but I'm biased for a reason, it's awesome. I was considering looking at creating a blender addon using Preach's qmdl python package since all of blender's addon's are scripted in python, but it currently has an md3 exporter which works nicely with Preach's md3tomdl, especially for static props (don't forget to unwrap them before using blender's md3 exporter! got my goat several times for that one) 

Exporting directly to it just feels so... liberating. No annoying conversion pipelines in between, no messing with qME to import a skin, etc.


There's a MD3 script too, but it has a horrible 'auto-scale' which makes my models too big by default having to input the manual scale to 1.00001 every time to turn that off.


There's also a nice ASE exporter script for q3map2 use, however it shits the UV on certain turned edges. Trial and error for that 

You know I started trying it and I'm hooked on direct export to mdl. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to get it to export in a different palette. No matter though since darkplaces has a skin override feature: mymodel.mdl_skin0.pcx 

I'm hoping to avoid the time to trial and error....what axis should weapon view models look down?

And how should the view model be positioned relative to the origin? 

For anyone who's using the fbxtomdl converter to get their model fix on, there's a new version out at:

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

Like the past few updates to md3tomdl, the changes are minor refinements rather than new features. The main bug this one nails is inaccuracy when converting skins - the UV coordinates are now always snapped to the centre of the pixel they lie within. The other changes relate to the latest version of the fbx library - the code has been made compatible and the pre-compiled version has been upgraded to include it. 

Does this .. I mean, it looks like it directly converts FBX files ... yeah? OH man. Going to play with this... 

Damn it. I'm terrible at this stuff. I think I installed stuff correctly but I get this error when running it:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/Bugs/FBXToMDL.jpg

Here's the FBX file but I don't think it's related ... is it?:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/Bugs/Q_Plaque.fbx 

Windows 8.1, if that matters. 

Annnnd it's because I didn't have a skin file in the folder. Never mind, I have an output.mdl created! Continuing to play...

Sorry for spam. 

It's actually a useful touch of feedback, not just to hear that someone's making use of it, but it might actually be an indication that something needs fixing. There's meant to be code that handles the case when no skin file is present by adding a dummy skin, but it looks like it's not working. Possibly the bug is isolated to the pre-built version, and maybe it's the warning message that's triggering things. I'll test a bit and see if I can fix that... 

If you ever need a kidney or something, preach, let me know. Damn...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/CustomModels.jpg

I never thought it would be this easy. I was procrastinating because the thought of Blender plugins and such was turning me off.

But this... THIS... 

I've pinned many hopes on this tool as well.

Thanks for the dedication Preach. 

So I'm messing around with model skins and I'll be damned if I can figure this out ... I loaded the Quake palette into Photoshop and I feel like I'm losing my mind.

I can't get the right colors to show up inside of Quake. I don't have a custom palette in any of my WAD files ... is this the correct palette?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/palette.jpg

I either get black models or the colors seem shifted off by one row ... it's weird and I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

Is Photoshop not the right tool for painting Quake skins? It has to work, right?

I'm exporting an 8-bit, indexed PCX file... 

http://celephais.net/stuff/palette.gif 

See, it's weird ... if I fill a texture with that light blue color (third row, far right side) it shows up black inside of Quake and in Trenchbroom it's a deep royal blue.

Fuuuuck. 

Maybe there's something helpful in this tutorial? http://ccorner.duke4.net/conversion-to-8-bit-palette/
Check the "image -> mode -> color table" window looks the same as the quake palette? 

Are you just flood filling skins with a single colour to test them? Some engines respond badly to that... They try to replace the bright blue backgrounds on some models with black to get rid of blue seams. However, they do this by flood-filling in black from the pixel in the top left of the skin to all adjacent same coloured pixels. Best to always make sure that pixel is a different colour to the rest of the skin. 

Photoshop has a dodgy PCX support, it seems. When you open Doom or Quake screenshots in it, they're greycale and with aspect ratio correction applied for some reason.

Exporting PCX images incompatible with Quake would make sense in this light. 

Thanks for the info guys, that's all useful!

So if Photoshop is dodgy, what's the recommended program to use for skinning models? What has good, solid PCX support? Or is PCX even the way to go? 

Image-wise, fbxtomdl supports 3 formats: pcx, tga and bmp. It is limited however by which variants of these formats the Python Image Library can load - I know that it doesn't cope well with 8-bit bmp files. You can use 24-bit skins and let the tool convert them, but there are times when, even if you've only used colours from the palette, that conversion can do undesirable things with fullbrights. So I'd recommend trying to get an 8-bit format working; if you want to stick with Photoshop maybe tga will work out well, if you want pcx support I've found GIMP works fine.

On the trail of the default skin bug, it's a bloody weird one. The bug doesn't occur in the python version, it's a side effect of the .exe conversion. The weird thing is that the bug occurs if your command line is "fbxtomdl.exe", but if you omit the ".exe" part then it works as intended. At least we have a workaround now... 

OK, neat. A 24-bit TGA converts accurately so maybe I'll roll with that for now. It will at least get me started... 

the pcx format that is used only has the bare minimum information contained in it. it does not contain the actual colour information of the indices used for each pixel so photoshop takes a guess and loads them as greyscale with 0 being black and 255 being white.
not sure about the aspect ratio, but likely something similar.