Found a great modelling tutorial

[peewee_RotA]

This is pretty good for beginners. If you already are an animator, this is probably an insult to your intelligence.

http://deimos.cottages.polycount.com/q2mtutor.html


The tool used in this tutorial, q2modeller, can be found here:
http://webadvisor.aupr.edu/noc/Downloads/q2mdl911.zip

[peewee_RotA]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

When mapping (UV i think is the correct term) the model. The lines that define the faces onto the skin are black. The default skin color is black. You cannot edit the color of the skin until the model has been mapped to the skin.

So in other words at the moment the freaking skin tool is invisible. You cannot see the faces that you add because the skin and lines are both black....

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Can you tell I'm agrivated?

[peewee_RotA]

O.k. solved 2 problems and want to shed some light on them:

#1) After you have created your model and are ready to map out the skin you press f2 to load the skin dialog box. Here you are stuck becaues the blank skin is black and the model's lines draw as black. So you cannot work unless you have a base skin first.

So open a program that can edit .pcx files. This includes Photoshop, NSTV, and Wally. Create a solid colored skin of any color other than black and save it in your working folder for your model. Now go back to the skin dialog box and press file->import->pcx file. Now you can select faces and use the "get from model" tool to map out your skin.


#2) Referencing a base skin is not as easy as it should be. I have a feeling that this is an unfinished feature the creature wasnt entirely aware of. Basically in quake 2 a model points to the skin it wants.

When you export your model to .md2 it will ask you which skin you want to point to.. however q2modeller has a quirk. It generates a relative path but not reletive to either your current directory or the location of your model. It generates this path reletive to your base working directory. Meaning you have to change our programs configuration for each model you are working on. This configuration is not specific to the model, meaning when you change your path for a new model you have to change it again manually when you load an old model.

So go to options->configure... and select the "directories" tab. In this tab use the browse tool to navigate to where your model is saved. This is where you're going to export your .md2 file. Make sure the skin you want is in this folder. Now press o.k.. Now you can export your .md2 and when you select your base skin it will be reletive to the current folder because you specified it manually.

I hope I explained that well. Just make sure your base folder is set to where you export your .md2 and you should be fine.

...

Just to update in order to specify a skin it must be the relative path based on the game's base directory. Basically quake2.exe is located in c:\quake2. The base directory is c:\quake2\baseq2. This base directory contains the games information (gamex86.dll) and all of the content inside the pak files. Pack files are like targ files in linux. They do basically no compression and their sole purpose is to encode multiple files into a single file maintaining directory structure. So if you extracted all of your pack files you would be able to see all the game content in their respective directories.

For example the model for the rocket if it were extracted would be in the folder c:\quake2\baseq2\models\objects\rocket. This path relative to the games base directory is \models\objects\rocket.

So lets say you're creating a throwing knife for your mod. You create your model and export it to the name "tris.md2" inside of your working directory. But to specify the skin you must create the folder models, and inside that create the folder objects, and inside that make the folder knife. So you would have the files as follows:
c:\mymodel\tris.md2
c:\mymodel\models\objects\knife\skin.pcx
You'll then move your model into:
c:\quake2\baseq2\models\objects\knife\tris.md2
c:\quake2\baseq2\models\objects\knife\skin.pcx

If you do not specify the models\objects\knife\ directory for your skin when exporting the model then it will look in c:\quake2\baseq2 for your skin at which point it will not find one and display a red shaded version instead of your skin.


In other words save your model in
c:\mymodel
and save your your skin in
c:\mymodel\models\objects\modelname\

[peewee_RotA]

Seeing verticies in the 3d view pane

All models consist of 2 things. Verticies and Faces. Verticies are represented by points in 3d space. To review intro to algebra a point is an infinitely small object to represent a location. You can not see points. You also cannot see lines and line segments which are infinitely thin. In 2d graphs however people will mark these locations by drawing dots and lines. However in a 3d world you would never see these objects. In fact if you created a model with 10 verticies floating above it that were never connected with faces then in the game the verticies would not be visible.

So in the 3d view of q2modeller it simulates the 3d world of the game where verticies are not visible. This is a headache but technically it's accurate. There is an option however that solves the problem called ticks. If you enable ticks then instead of trying to accurate portay points, all points in the model will appear in all views, both 2d and 3d, as 3 intersecting lines resembling cross hairs.

These are not the same as verticies however they helpfully mark the location of where the verticies would be. The major difference is that ticks are obviously much larger than the small dots that you see in the 2d view. This causes 2 problems in the 3d view. You can always see all the verticies in your view area even if a face is blocking it and it is very difficult to judge depth using verticies.

So if you are building faces on say a sphere you're going to see the ticks from both sides. Also the size of the ticks makes it difficult to judge how far away each one is. There is some change to the size of the tick representig your points based on it's distance however it is very common to have ticks on the opposite side of your model to be the same size as the ones you are working with. This means you have to rotate your model almost every time you build a face to make sure you are not looking at the wrong ticks.


The shortcut key to enable or disable ticks is T