Any modellers want to do some modelling?

[Quake Jesus]

Hey guys,

I am planning on putting skeletal animation into quake. This would allow very nice effects, like ragdolls. But the quake models don't have skeletons so they would need to be remodeled. If you are interested in remodeling some of the monsters, I am going to use this library called Cal3d CAL3D Character Animation Library to do the skeletal animation. You own the art and can license it however you want, but it will be cool to see monsters die with ragdolls and also there is alot of other cool things we could do with it. You don't have to go overboard with them but I'm not an artist so it's up to you.

See yah later

[Quake Jesus]

It looks like Dark Places already supports skeletal animation, and physics so I don' t have to do that. If anyone would like to model the original monsters using skeletal animation though feel free, I was going to do it sometime but I'm not an artist I was just shooting for about the same quality as quake which isn't really very good by today's standards.

[grave_digga]

If it would be easy to do it would be allready be done. Creating/changing/modifying models ist the most complicated part of quake modding. Even re-skinning is very hard.

[Quake Jesus]

It seems like a bad idea anyways, it would break all the quakec code that works with each frame. Maybe you could make it so the frames would trigger when interpolating the bones, but I think it isn't a good idea now.

I don't doubt it is hard, I have done modelling and it sure isn't easy.

[gdiddy62]

The idea sounds very appealing. I hope there may be a workaround or someone willing to take on the challenges you guys keep bringing up.

[LambentHammerBurst]

Honestly a quicker way to do this would be to simply leave the enemies untouched model wise, then make a separate model of a enemy that is skeletal and apply the ragdoll to this instead. So you'd have this:
soldier.mdl
soldier-ragdoll.mdl

When the Grunt dies, his model will then change to soldier-ragdoll.mdl
The ragdoll first few frames of animation (on each individual animation) would match the original death animations and there you go.

[Quake Jesus]

Hehe I was thinking the same thing. Pull the model out of the MDL file and then harness a skeleton on it.

[golden_boy]

I started doing this for Remake Quake a while ago, using the IQM format (Darkplaces, FTE and the unreleased version of RMQ support this afaik) and just adding skeletons to the normal monsters. So far I only have a complete rig for the grunt and his variants. It can probably be adapted to the enforcer etc.

Not sure how I'm going to do the weapons yet.

Obviously you still have to redo all the animations, which is a lot of work but the rig allows you to do new animations as well. Prepare to raise the polycount of the models some, because some anims look really shitty with so little polygons. The mesh simply deforms a lot better with a couple additional edge loops.

You can simply keep the skins while doing that, if you import the MDLs into Blender with the front/back projection intact. I forgot how I did that though, probably with Noesis via MD3 or thereabouts.

There is a ragdoll like mod for Quake called sagdoll, also.

IQM has an exporter for Blender, Noesis can also edit/convert IQMs.

By the way about the QC, the IQM implementation in RMQ uses $frame, exactly the same method as for MDLs.

If there is interest in the IQM stuff, I'm sure we can pack up an engine release.

Edit: Actually, RMQ accepts .iqm models as *replacements* for .mdl, so soldier.iqm is loaded instead of soldier.mdl if it exists. The IQM must have the same frame count and anims though.

Not sure how DP handles this...

[Quake Jesus]

Well I am not much of an artist, I did some modelling before but I suck at it, I am a programmer. But I was thinking it could be possible to do soft body physics without a skeleton, it would be like a blob of jello though. The models in Quake are so low poly I could really just get away with treating the whole mesh like a blob of jello, which might be funnier than ragdolls anyways.