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. 

Today I'm launching a bi-annual feature called "Model of the Week" where I offer a new quake model for use in maps. This week: waterfall.mdl

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/waterfall.zip

This model comes with a demonstration map, which uses quoth's mapobject_custom to add the model to the map*. Extract the map into quake\quoth\maps and the model into quake\quoth\progs. I recommend viewing in winquake first, and then in stock fitzquake to see the "progressive enhancement".

Usage:
waterfall.mdl is a 32 polygon model, measuring 64 units wide and ~192 units tall. The origin lies dead centre of the bottom of the waterfall. Place it in your map accordingly, with angles facing outwards, and set the frame to 6 for the loop animation. The model comes with 5 skins:
Freshwater(0)
Effluent(1)
Molten(2)
Blood(3)
Toxichem(4)
This covers the main fluids in quake maps, but if you need something unusual or a better match for your water texture, the model is easy to customise. Simply inserting the desired water texture as a skin will create a reasonable effect, although adding "waves" to the top and bottom is strongly recommended so that the flow can be read easily.

Care has been taken to ensure that no visual artifacts can be seen behind the waterfall, but if you want to let players get behind the waterfall you may want to look at the flowflat sequence, which is not as tall as well as being flattened, so that it can be used for the back-face.

Advanced usage:
If you poke around the model you'll probably notice the spring and dryup sequences. These two animations were actually a happy accident, they were a byproduct of creating the main loop which I realised could be useful about half way through modelling.

If you want to use them to create a waterfall that starts and/or stops you will need to tweak the model a little bit. The important thing to do is to ungroup the flow animation. This lets you line up the frames so that the interpolation and waves move consistantly. To make the animation smooth always transition from spring7 to flow1 and from either flow8 or flow16 to dryup1.

So Preach, I don't want a 3 page diatribe on how you made this thing work but...would it be possible to make a custom-designed waterfall model with a more complex flow within a static model?
We really shouldn't be talking here, but I know somewhere more private - e-mail me.



*Just to note use of quoth is just me doing the laziest thing that would work - the quoth mod is not doing any clever behind-the-scenes stuff to enhance the effect. It simply precaches the model and displays it in the map.