When I saw the serpent in the Qtest map I thought it looked like a bad imported dxf file. One that appears after bad im/exporting.

So I decided it could look better, but after my first attempts I realized how difficult it is to import a good dxf/3ds file into QMLE.

Always the skinfile looks damaged with triangles appearing mirrored. When I finnaly had a good one I thought to be right.

Obviously the skinfile tends to keep its mirrored habbit.
What to do about it?

http://members.home.nl/gimli/Base.jpg 

after replacing all distorted triangles I ended up with a meshed skinfile.
Then I loaded the model into q2mdlr9b and imported the skinfile in pcx.
It loaded well in qmle after redrawing the verts on the skinfile.

I had to know this before, after all the time I spend in QMLE correcting skinfiles. 

here's my result of the serpent.
I only construct the model, the skin is one of androidart.com I lately saw here on the board.
Sure is a fine skin texture piece.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/serp00.gif 

pretty nice... it'd be cool to see a flock of these swarming around a map. 

 

Madfox, that is very good stuff :) You should really use that as a new monster type. Would look awesome as a flock swirling around high above the player before attacking. 

just as ambient creatures that fly about.

Very nice, indeed! 

It's Quake - they should be trying to kill you. 

Thanks for your attend.

While I'm learning to understand what makes monster developement so hard I'm mostly surprised by the way I'm struggling with QMLE.

I've spent months on Bones trying to correkt verticemeshes. Thing is: QMLE imports from the baseframe. If this baseframe is allready in the model.mdl the program tends to import dxf/3ds files corrupted.

Me being glad to have the model in Qmle didn't mind to go frame by frame updating all corrupted vertices, with the habbit Qmle always picks up the wrong one.

Untill I found out when importing the fresh baseframe and then at one stroke all frames importing delivered a clean model.
My god... !

Then the skinproblem appeared.
When an imported basefram is in QMLE, and not all trianles are visible (which is always the cause) the imported skinfile will be partly mirrored on the unseen triangles.
It took me almost ten years to conclude this.

Now looking back it comes to me as if the serpent model in Qtest is a kind of distorted imported model. Although they (ID) had to take of as less verts as possible they made some good models with these limits.

The Qtest-serpent has 90 verts and 178 tris.
Mine ended up with 95 verts and 190 tris.
Can't help seeing the reminisence with the later dragon models. 

congrats dude, its very cool model :) 

Anyone know if this was ever released?

basically I want to remove the 'helpful' auto-UV map feature that breaks my UV's and makes them shitty Quake front/back projection when importing non .mdl stuff.

I realise having the source might not help me still so am going to try the model exporter from Spirit's bounty as well.

Doubt that'll work either though since Qme only imports frames in .dxf - importing udner two distinct formats will probably renumber the verticies and corrupt the mesh. 

two apps that would be nice to be open sourced. 

so he can go on a rant on how all of quakes stuff should be open sourced, at least form this point forward.

and then ill be back later to agree with what he said 

to be part of Baker's army on that front.

Non-open is death. Even the most dedicated are only human. A binary is a slow death. 

What's a decent way to convert to the Quake palette from full colour in Photoshop?

Metslime, what are the changes that you'd make to TexMex? It seems to do pretty much everything needed, for me. Just curious. 

there's at least one crash bug that i hit periodically, plus it doesn't remember folder names from previous export/open/save operations, also, maybe some better fullbright handling. 

Would be nice. 

ijed, are you asking what will yield the best conversion result?

the only thing i'd say is to check each of the different dithering options. some types of textures will look better with one type of dithering pattern, and others will look awful.

also, unless you want fullbrights, make sure the palette you're using to convert has the fullbright colours blacked out. 

Thanks for the info. 

If you find the image you're converting has different "textures" within it, you may notices that a type of dithering works well on some parts but not others. In quake, this can be particularly apparent when converting an image with colours outside the usual range - often a less dithered conversion will alter the colours more significantly.

In this case, I've found it useful to do each type of dithering on copies of the original image, all moved to different layers. You can then use one as a base and create a hard-edged mask on the other layers. This way you can get the best of both conversions fairly quickly. 

hadn't run into a case where multiple dithering methods were needed, but this is a good thing to remember, thanks ^_^ 

Be trying these out today - my skins are typically pretty ugly thanks to bad conversion. 

limited to like 6 or 7 frames? i have a 12 frame skingroup but it seems to loop before playing the whole thing. T_T

option to manually animate is available, of course, but i finally found something to use that stupid skingroup thing and it's broken. :P 

DP has this bug fixed, or was it a limitation in the original glquake?

i can't run that engine to check. :S i'm using quakespasm.

it's not an actual frame thing-- manually animating the 12 frames works fine. 

and might only accept 1, 2, or 4 skins in a framegroup. Or maybe even worse than that. I'm pretty sure 4 works.

Fun fact: fitzquake probably hasn't fixed this.