Models: ethics, etc

[ajay]

Hey nahuel; what do you edit iqm models in?

[nahuel]

sorry i do not understand your question ! i think you can not edit iqm models, just compile it, but you can edit easily smd files with milkshape3d or blender or another program

[ajay]

Thanks nahuel. Going slightly off-topic, but, hey it's my thread , what are the limits of quake .mdl?
For example, how many frames of animation, how many tri's etc., how ("physically") big can it be. Also, I'm guessing that engines have different limits to editors, e.g. darkplaces could handle more than qMe.
Thanks in advance

[Seven]

Hello ajay,

These are the informations I found:

Here are some constant values defining maximal dimensions:

Maximum number of triangles: 2048
Maximum number of vertices: 1024
Maximum number of texture coordinates: 1024
Maximum number of frames: 256
Number of precalculated normal vectors: 162

But didnt you want to use a 'newer' format (with higher limits) ?


And yes, Darkplaces can handle higher values than shown above. But it is an extension and other engines will not be able to support it properly.

Best wishes.


EDITED:
QME also doesnt seem to bother wether you save out a .mdl file with higher values. I had to learn it the hard way with the spider monster. It has 401 animation frames and a lot too many vertices. QME never told me that the .mdl limits have been reached when saving ...
As far as I remember, Noesis informs you about these things when exporting. Which is good.

[talisa]

why would you wanna use the old horrible mdl-format?
it has limits which are way to low and vertex-positions which are way to inaccurate

you should go with at least MD3, which doesnt have the low limits MDL has
MD3 isnt perfect by any means, but its perfect for still models


for animated models like monsters id say use IQM
Inter-Quake Model (IQM) Format

[ajay]

Only really because I'm used to the tools; qMe, qmeddler etc., to modify (scale, skinned, name the frames, remove ones I don't want etc) the converted models and get them working in-game correctly.
To that end, what are the best model editors for modifying md3's in? Simple the better, with easy (ish) skinning, scaling, modifying etc? Thanks.

[nahuel]

Only really because I'm used to the tools; qMe, qmeddler etc., to modify (scale, skinned, name the frames, remove ones I don't want etc) the converted models and get them working in-game correctly.
To that end, what are the best model editors for modifying md3's in? Simple the better, with easy (ish) skinning, scaling, modifying etc? Thanks.

is not possible to edit vertex in a md3 (like q1mdl ) , if you want to edit vertex and animations you need to compile it. I use milkshape 3d to compile md3.. ANiway with quark you can delete frames and rename the skins, with neosis you can reescale it

[talisa]

blender with an md3 exporter.
i myself use this exporter: http://jkhub.org/files/file/1413-ble...-plugin-suite/
works perfectly in blender 2.64 and is easy to use.

just make sure to triangulate the model manually and
add a custom property to it with "property name" set to 'md3shader' and at "property value" you add the name of the texture you want the model to use.

[golden_boy]

Learning Blender is something that looks daunting at first, but it pays off. Blender is so much better than QME. It has tools that make modelling and animating a lot easier ("extrude" and "loop cut" alone are worth their weight in gold), after you learn how to use them.

You can also make entire levels in Blender, if you use the Quake 3 BSP format (requires Darkplaces or FTE.)

There are tons of Blender tutorials on youtube. For free.

I mean it's free, and it's good enough that professional artists are starting to use it, so using QME really doesn't look like the smart choice to me.

MD3 is better than MDL already. IQM has the added benefit of bones, which you can manipulate from CSQC to do ragdolls and stuff like that if you're so inclined. And the IQM toolset comes with a Blender exporter, so it's as easy as modelling in Blender and directly exporting to IQM.

By the way, MH once made a little known tool that allows you to set the Quake flags like rotate etc. on an IQM model.

http://svn.icculus.org/remakequake/e...ental/iqmflag/

[ajay]

I take on board everything everyone is saying, but I just find Blender totally impenetrable. However good it may or may not be, there's not a single intuitive aspect of it at all. Everything has to be "learnt"; which may sound lazy and demanding, but I mean there's not obvious route to achieve things, so that when comparatively simple tasks like applying a texture aren't achieved by /Texture/Choose/Apply - voila, I think that's bad design. Added to that no standard presentation, i.e. whatever .blend you open you'll be presented, seemingly to me anyway, a totally different layout, makes it just awful. It may be free, powerful and 'simple' after a huge learning curve, but it's just a mess imo.

Exporting seems to rarely work straightforwardly; I can't get md3 exporting to work; I can get an md3, but it's 1kb and obviously useless. Even the grass models Steve kindly linked for more, are just a nightmare to do anything meaningful with. I've spent the best part of my leave from work, trying to get models working properly without any success; it's what puts me off any kind of fully modelling for myself; I just don't have the time to wade through counter-intuitive learning curves to create my own stuff, when I can't even convert ready made ones.

I realise the obvious answer to this is that I just don't know enough yet and I need to learn more, and that I'm clearly less than rational about it at the moment (very true), but I've spent about 40 hours over the last week trying with this stuff and I don't feel any further along. Once back to work tomorrow I'll be down to about 7hrs a week, if I'm lucky, and I just don't have the time to learn really complicated tools. It's why I stick with the old stuff, because I know basically what I'm doing, and I've only time to increase my skills with them, rather than reach a lower level of competence with newer ones.

I don't think I've ever been more frustrated about modding since I started; clearly what I need to learn to do what I aspire to do is more than I've time and energy for; as an example I'd spent 4 hours scaling, repositioning and renaming frames in a model, only to find that somewhere during the conversion process it had flipped 180 degrees in it's walk cycle. Once I'd retrieved the keyboard from the garden I'd lost the will to unravel why, work out how to fix it and then spend hours doing so, when I still hadn't worked out why none of the software I had would conveniently skin the bloody thing or whether or not it would actually show up in Quake properly.

It may seem that I'm after free achievements without putting the work in, or trying to find shortcuts, but I just keep running into unexpected roadblocks and errors, that are both counterintuitive and apparently unsolvable, and I've less than no time to repeatedly bang my head against the wall trying to overcome them.

I do, however, really appreciate that people have taken the time to reply here. I'm not so much having a bad day as a bad 10 days, and I'm somewhat at the point where something I do as a hobby, as a fun challenge and distraction, has become an infuriating chore. Hopefully I've not brought anyone else down with my self-pity

[golden_boy]

I take on board everything everyone is saying, but I just find Blender totally impenetrable. However good it may or may not be, there's not a single intuitive aspect of it at all. Everything has to be "learnt"; which may sound lazy and demanding, but I mean there's not obvious route to achieve things, so that when comparatively simple tasks like applying a texture aren't achieved by /Texture/Choose/Apply - voila, I think that's bad design.

Yes, that does sound a bit lazy tbh. Every new software will have to be learned.

The obvious route to achieve things is to watch two or three Youtube tutorials for Blender newbies (and follow them to a T.) Be aware that Blender changed its UI (for the better) after version 2.5, and introduced n-gons from version 2.63, so choose tutorials for recent Blender versions (2.63 and up.) The other part is to use google whenever you encounter a problem.

Applying a texture in Blender is as simple as clicking on the MATERIAL tab and clicking "New". That gives your object a material that can be rendered. Blender is a pro tool, and as such it operates on materials, not simply texture images. A material contains a lot more than just an image. If you want that material to have an image texture assigned, it's as simple as clicking on the TEXTURE tab (now that was obvious, right?) and again clicking "New" and choosing from the "Type" dropdown menu "Image or Movie". (Because Blender can use many other things as input for the texture.) Thereafter, under "Image" (still in the same tab) you click "Open" to assign your image... and you could have figured this out in five minutes by simple googling.

If you want to see the texture on your object in the 3D viewport, you also have to go to the UV/Image editor (textures have to do with images, right...) and choose your image from the dropdown list there (after you have UV unwrapped your object, naturally.) This because Blender supports multiple UV maps and textures on the same object (which crazy people like myself actually find useful), so you've got to tell it which one it should use for this UV map.

Would you call this process terribly hard? Is it really so unobvious that you need the MATERIAL and TEXTURE tabs to assign, well, a material/texture?

Added to that no standard presentation, i.e. whatever .blend you open you'll be presented, seemingly to me anyway, a totally different layout, makes it just awful.

Your mistake, to be honest. If you had taken the time to actually look at the Open File dialog, you would have noticed the checkbox that says "Load UI"... and that would have fixed your problem.

It may be free, powerful and 'simple' after a huge learning curve, but it's just a mess imo.

Your opinion is not well-founded. Youtube is full of twelve year olds who make stuff in Blender. If a twelve year old can learn Blender, everybody can.

Exporting seems to rarely work straightforwardly; I can't get md3 exporting to work; I can get an md3, but it's 1kb and obviously useless. Even the grass models Steve kindly linked for more, are just a nightmare to do anything meaningful with. I've spent the best part of my leave from work, trying to get models working properly without any success; it's what puts me off any kind of fully modelling for myself; I just don't have the time to wade through counter-intuitive learning curves to create my own stuff, when I can't even convert ready made ones.

Again, this sounds like you have an attention span problem. Exporting to a certain format is something you have to learn ONCE, then use forever. It's well worth to spend a couple hours/days to research it, talk to people who have it working, until you've got it working, too. You seem to expect everything to just come to you in a matter of minutes. You would be shocked by programs like 3ds Max, Unity, or anything else that is used to make games. It simply is not that easy, especially when you use outdated formats like MD3. (Yes, that is outdated.) You apparently didn't ask anybody how to get the MD3 exporter working, neither did you google for tutorials about it (katsbits has some good ones, which I even mentioned on this forum before, you would only have had to search for it) and neither did you simply try the IQM exporter (suggested in this thread) which is MADE to work out of the box with Blender, by the very people who made the IQM format. Sorry, you just need to try a little harder.

Blender is also not a dedicated model converter; use the right tool for the job! Noesis is a model converter, Blender is a modeling suite.

I'm clearly less than rational about it at the moment (very true), but I've spent about 40 hours over the last week trying with this stuff and I don't feel any further along. Once back to work tomorrow I'll be down to about 7hrs a week, if I'm lucky, and I just don't have the time to learn really complicated tools. It's why I stick with the old stuff, because I know basically what I'm doing, and I've only time to increase my skills with them, rather than reach a lower level of competence with newer ones.

Yeah, just leave it for a while and come back later then. It seems like it's your frustration and anger that keeps you from making progress.

You say you want to increase your skills with the old tools; unfortunately this is not going to happen. The old tools will end up limiting the growth of your skills, which is why some people are suggesting to move away from them.

And a week is nothing when it comes to learning game development skills, believe me. I only learned how to export smoothing groups with my IQMs after I had been using them for months. That's the time scale you should be expecting.

I just keep running into unexpected roadblocks and errors, that are both counterintuitive and apparently unsolvable, and I've less than no time to repeatedly bang my head against the wall trying to overcome them.

Newsflash: Making games is HARD.

I realize I may sound harsh here, but I think you need to hear it, and I'm saying it to help you, not to insult you.

Keep at it. Other people have learned it, so you can too. You may absolutely ask me any Blender questions you have. You generally need to talk to people a lot more when you encounter problems, instead of throwing your keyboard out of the window

Asking questions is half the battle.

[MadGypsy]

@Once I'd retrieved the keyboard from the garden

There's your whole problem! Blender requires that you have the keyboard connected to your computer. It's always the simplest things, right? One time I was freaking out that my computer would not turn on, just to realize that I tripped the switch on my surge protector.

Anyway, make sure your keyboard is plugged in (or connected however it connects) and blender will be far easier to use.

lmao

[Dutch]

You have to look at blender from a different angle: it takes nearly impossible tasks to do by hand and simply makes them difficult. Difficult is better than impossible. Good luck building a model and smoothly animating it in QME. If you happen to pull it off, it won't be pretty, and it will have taken at a minimum 20 times the amount of time.

I speak from direct experience. I used to think QME was the only way to go. Then I started to realize the quality of work people were putting out was waaaay beyond the abilities of QME.

Learning the tricks and shortcuts in blender now will automatically increase your work quality and SUSBSTANTIALLY decrease the amount of time you spend doing it.

By not learning blender, you are only limiting yourself.

I noticed you are concerned with spending time learning it. Believe me, if making a mod or game is your goal, you'll save countless hours just learning it.

You can of course still use programs like QME and Wally in conjunction witg blender. But the bulk of the work should be in blender.

[golden_boy]

One has to be fair and say that Sock or Preach make cool models in QME. For vanilla Quake, that is. But a lot of those are modified Quake monsters. I have tried to model in QME before, and it was so frustrating that I installed Blender and never looked back. The way in which you animate models in Blender (skeleton, pose mode, keyframes) made sense to me. I never understood how to animate stuff efficiently in QME. QME also doesn't have a lot of modeling tools whereas Blender has tools that automate a lot of things (bevel, inset, extrude, bridge, loop cut, subdivide, make tris/make quads, edge slide, vertex slide, and so on.) Finally, I much prefer Blender's UVmapping tools to the front/back project thing that QME has. And Blender's UV unwrapping is generally lauded even by pro 3D artists.

On top of that, Blender has more efficient navigation tools (fly mode, local view, layers and so forth.) Blender also can create smooth groups by marking edges sharp. It is very easy to model on a grid in Blender (for environment modeling.) Let's not start about modifiers such as array and curve, which make it incredibly easy to create things like chains, barbed wire or ammo belts. Or the sculpting tools. It's just a different league.

If it is your goal to generally improve your 3D modeling and game making skills (either because you simply enjoy it, or because you have an eye on freelancing or whatnot), it is unavoidable to pick up new software now and again.

Worldcraft and QME are OK for making faithful Quake stuff. But even so, Blender probably makes modeling a lot easier. Just got to get over the first shock. You'll be glad you did.

[MadGypsy]

I learned blender way back in 2.49b. I never took a more current tutorial and I picked up 2.(6&7) with no problem. They moved some stuff around a bit but it wasn't all that hard to find, and a look at the latest keyboard shortcut graphic told me everything else I wanted to know.

I'm with GB on blender "just making sense to me". Before blender, I was using Maya and a lot of the workflow is very similar (or at least it was back in the day). Really, I get what people are saying about the blender "hump" but that hump is nothing if you are just willing to read some books and watch some videos. I read the BSoD books (which are all free) and watched a bunch of noob tutorial vids. It all came together rather quickly. Another good reference is... crap I can't find it. It's some shit hosted by a school (university) There are like 2 or 3 books and thery walk you through everything real smooth.

Edit: oh wait, I found it (stupid shitty yahoo search). Blender Basics 4th edition.pdf (right click / save target as). I used to get these books from texas university or something like that but I can't find that anymore. There may even be a 5th or even 6th edition but, I didn't search that hard. This book will definitely suffice to get you in the pocket.

For me, books are better than video for most things cause I can read substantially faster than a video can show me. I can also look at graphical charts and almost take a mental picture of them (like keyboard shortcut charts). Maybe you feel the same way. If so, this is one of many books that can help you.

You could also just go straight to the official docs

*I don't have a photographic memory. I just have a really good one (memory)