Quake 2 Map question

[[BTF] Reflex]

Very kewl,  the model not the problem.

After reading step 2 I knew where this post was going.


   I liked some of the features quark has, so after building a map in worldcraft I saved as a .map file and loaded it up in quark to tinker around some.  The map looks fine in quark, but when you compile it messes up or moves so many things it opens up light leaks in dozens of places,  walls dont meet, things that should meet even with the floor are raised a few units...   Load the same .map file back into worldcraft and it compiles file.  Quark .map files open in worldcraft, but don't show up as having anything in them.   Open a 407 kb .map file in quark..  save it, and now it's 385.

  I dunno where the problem is occurring,
                if it's related to your problem,
                how to fix it,
                why I posted this

But I hope you get it sorted out. 
 

can milkshape open and handle quark made models?

Open model in milkshape - save
then open in quark - save

Different size?

Is there anything too nerdy about having milkshape added to your spell checker dictionary?     

Should I goto sleep?

=p       

[|iR|Focalor]

Well I registered on the MilkShape forums a day or two ago, but I don't guess an admins looked at registrations since then because I don't have posting privs yet. And there's plenty of posts there, but it looks like most of them are pre-2008, so maybe they don't get much traffic anymore. In which case I'm screwed if I need any real help. But I searched a good bit on there, and about the only thing I could find that "might" explain the problem is this:

http://www.chumba.ch/chumbalum-soft/forum/showthread.php?t=2869

From the #3 post in the thread, Little_Dragon says...

From what I've read here in the forums, the problem, unfortunately, is with the .MD2 format itself. It isn't very precise. No matter what route you take to convert your model to .MD2, it'll have the jello-wobble tendency.

I've tried a few different things, moving things around, making 2 different md2's (one of the circle and slayer logo, one of the sword) and then merging those in Quark. If I remove the circle and slayer logo and just have the sword handle moved to about the origin point, it exports slightly less fucked up. But then once I assemble the two parts back into one MD2 in Quark and export it to a new MD2, it turns out completely fucked again, only WORSE. So I'm thinking that maybe there's limitations with the MD2 format to where it has a specific grid that vertices and/or vertexes can occupy, and if they AREN'T in those predetermined places, then the conversion process just snaps any non-conforming vertices to the nearest grid point. Seems like what may be happening, I dunno.

Nevertheless, I don't think there's any way I'm gonna be able to keep this shit from going all cockeyed in random spots... unless someone knows what the hell I'm doing wrong. And I've tried plenty of shit already. Been sitting here for hours now racking my brain and trying shit to no avail.

So maybe both our cases are the very same problem and it explains why your maps get raped apart in places during conversion.

can milkshape open and handle quark made models?

I dunno. I've never worked with Quark format models, don't even know what it's called. The only thing I've imported into Quark so far is MD3 (Quake3) and MD2 (Quake2). But I doubt MilkShape would import anything with whatever extension Quark specific model files use.

[The Happy Friar]

Jello wobble only effected animated models I thought.  could be wrong, but nothing static I made seemed to wobble.

Since I have no experience with Milkshape or Quark, try Q2 Model Editor: http://www.moddb.com/members/thehappyfriar/downloads/quake-2-model-editor-v090

I use it only for setting up my skins after I made the model in Blender, but it should do almost everything you want in one program vs a couple.

[|iR|Focalor]

Jello wobble only effected animated models I thought.  could be wrong, but nothing static I made seemed to wobble.

Since I have no experience with Milkshape or Quark, try Q2 Model Editor: http://www.moddb.com/members/thehappyfriar/downloads/quake-2-model-editor-v090

I use it only for setting up my skins after I made the model in Blender, but it should do almost everything you want in one program vs a couple.

I already have it. I have NO FRICKING IDEA how to use it to draw anything worth a damn though, and there's literally nothing around the internet giving tutorials for it. I've even checked internet archive sites that save pages that don't exist anymore, and can't really find jack shit about Q2 Modeller.  But I've still already been using it... kinda. See, I'm a dumbass when it comes to modelling, so naturally my method of getting from point A to point B is gonna be pretty stupid, haha.

What I was doing before I had MilkShape was:

1. Using Quark to open a pre-existing model of the same type I wanted to do so that I could use the old one as an overall size reference for the new one,
2. then designing the model and exporting it as MD2,
3. then using Photoshop to create a blank all white indexed (q2 pallete applied) PCX about 256x256,
4. then opening the MD2 with Q2 Model Editor, going up to "skins" and setting the texture dimensions to 256x256 (because I didn't know how to do it in Quark before, but I do now), and then deleting all the mapping, and saving that as a new MD2 (because I didn't want the old mapping lines confusing me once I got to the next step)
5. then I'd open Npherno's Skin Tool and lay out all the triangles in an arrangement that I liked,
6. then I'd take a screenshot of the wireframe arrangement on the blank white texture,
7. then I'd paste that to a png, delete all the white background, resize it to exactly 512x512, and use the wireframe channel as a template guide for where to place things, then save that as a PSD doc in case I wanted to make changes later, then turn off the wireframe layer, save again to a PNG for the actual texture.

So see. That's probably the really hard way to do it, but it works best for me, so whatever. And that's still basically the plan for how I wanna continue making models, only using MilkShape instead of Quark for the initial designing process. I've actually added more steps now that I'm using MilkShape though, because now after I finish mapping out the texture in Npherno Skin Tool, the plan is to reopen the model in Quark and scale it to the proper size and move it into the correct position.

Don't think that's gonna work though unless it's a less complex model unlike the one I'm on now. Because converting it to MD2 from Quark is probably gonna shift the damn vertices around a second time once it happens after exporting from MilkShape the first time.

I dunno. After playing around with it a little, seems like the closer to the origin point any part of the model is, the less likely it is to skew any of the vertice points from their intended positions.

At this point, just looks like I'm gonna have to say fuck it and go ahead and put the swords and slayer logos in place (and just get used to the idea that it's gonna take me 12 forevers to map the texture out for this model), and then screw with sizing it and moving things and saving several MD2's of it until I can finally get one that will only distort the model shape minimally and just... learn to live with it, I guess.

edit: Oh yeah, also forgot to mention that now I design the model in MilkShape, then export, the open it in Quark and end up having to delete about 29 duplicate "frames" because the "md2.qc" (a Quake control file that specifies model location, skin location, origin point, which frames are for what animations, etc) file that milkshape uses automatically assumes it's an animated model and throws all that into MD2 as well. I dunno if I can just delete the lines about "$sequence" completely to prevent it from making duplicate animation frames like that or not, haven't tried yet. Yet another thing you just gotta figure out on your own because there isn't much step-by-step instruction for using MilkShape to make Q2 specific models.

[The Happy Friar]

I used to do similar steps with "way back when".  I took ~6 months to learn Blender 2.49, took a couple weeks after that to figure out how the animation text file works with the Blender 2.49 md2 exporter, then said FU when Blender 2.5x came out and they changed the UI.  So I'm still using the "old" one. 

I remember in the early 2000's I was soooo proud I made the grenade in Quake a sheep, and when it exploded it went "blah!".  Those were the days....

[|iR|Focalor]

After plenty more jackin' around with this sumbitch, I've come to the conclusion that my hypothesis was obviously correct. Most likely... the md2 format does have it's own grid system it operates on for the location of vertices and if your model has vertices that don't land on any points on that grid, converting it to md2 will automatically shift the vertices to those locations. I've spent EVEN MORE time screwing with this crap, moving everything into position, even scaling it all down, even tried changing the grid scale in MilkShape and snapping the vertices to several different grid scales. And every single damn time, it completely tweaks the living shit outta the sword handles.

This was the "best" result I was able to get, and it STILL sucks donkey balls. And as you can see from the side view, it's completely flattened one side of the eagle talon guard while it left the other side kinda rounded. And if you look at the front view, none of the talons on the pommel match one another either.


So... so much for that idea, I guess. Into the trash it go.


Would sure be nice to know exactly WHAT the grid scale md2 uses is and how to use that within MilkShape to snap all the vertices I draw to it so that I can kinda have a better idea of what something is actually going to look like once it's exported so I won't waste so much time designing something only to have the end result be completely fucking useless.

Only other option I see at this point would just be to have a single cylinder on it's side with the swords, handles and all, laid on it as one image... which would look COMPLETELY retarded.

[Jay Dolan]

MD2 does not have a grid system, but it does effectively "quantize" vertices to 0.125 units (okay, I guess you could call that a grid ). What's really happening is that vertices are stored as 16 bit numbers in MD2. When the program goes to squash your 32 bit floating point vertex coordinates into 16 bits, some precision is lost (obviously). The smallest value representable in this 16 bit format is +/- 0.125. The largest value is +/- 4096.0.

Side bit of trivia: all entity positions in Quake2 are represented this way in the network protocol. It's actually why your player "drifts" side to side slightly when you try to walk straight forward and backwards.

For best results, you should create your model in a scale that is relatively close to what it would be in Quake units. That will minimize the clusterfucking that happens to it during export.

Another option, if both programs support the format, would be to use .obj for your interchange format. It natively supports floating point vertices (it's actually a text-based format).

[|iR|Focalor]

MD2 does not have a grid system, but it does effectively "quantize" vertices to 0.125 units (okay, I guess you could call that a grid ). What's really happening is that vertices are stored as 16 bit numbers in MD2. When the program goes to squash your 32 bit floating point vertex coordinates into 16 bits, some precision is lost (obviously). The smallest value representable in this 16 bit format is +/- 0.125. The largest value is +/- 4096.0.

Side bit of trivia: all entity positions in Quake2 are represented this way in the network protocol. It's actually why your player "drifts" side to side slightly when you try to walk straight forward and backwards.

For best results, you should create your model in a scale that is relatively close to what it would be in Quake units. That will minimize the clusterfucking that happens to it during export.

Another option, if both programs support the format, would be to use .obj for your interchange format. It natively supports floating point vertices (it's actually a text-based format).

I "think" MilkShape can export to .OBJ, the export list is longer than the screen can hold, and one of the selections is "Wavefront OBJ", so I guess so. I don't think it's necessary though.

So if the smallest value is 0.125, I'm guessing that if I set the grid scale to 0.125 then "select all", then "snap to grid", that should minimize any contorting of vertexes during export if not eliminate it completely. Think I tried that value already and it was still messing up the points too much, but I'll give it another shot. Rather than exporting from MilkShape and then scaling it in Quark, I'll just load up a reference model in MilkShape and scale/position it the best I can there before snapping all the points to that grid scale and then only export it once. Hopefully it'll work. *crosses fingers*

Agh! Shit shit shit shit. Well, that "kinda" works. It still tweaks it more than I'd like, but that ain't even the problem now. Pretty sure I read somewhere that the maximum polygon limit for Q2 models was something like 1024. Got it scaled and positioned in Milkshape. Got it exported. Loaded it up in Quark to delete all the duplicate frames, did so, then was gonna remap the texture to something extra tiny in the bottom corner of the image so I could have room to work on laying it all out manually in Npherno Skin Tool... when I notice this in the skin-view window:



So even if it weren't true that the max polygon limit was 1024 and it was actually 2048, it'd STILL be too many triangles.

So this model is dead in the water no matter what.  Oh well. Had learn this lesson sooner or later, might as well have been my first model with MilkShape that did it.

edit: Or... maybe it's 4096. Still, 2k+ triangles for one model in Q2 seems pretty excessive.

[[BTF] Reflex]

     You are too detailed.

Well, not in my book.  If I could I would build maps brick by brick and add all the mortar cracks, hundreds of other details that would drive the build programs nuts and probably crash the game.

I usually make a map as complex as want, and towards the final stages delete tons of stuff that it doesnt really need, and simplify other parts so it runs better.

In cnest.bsp there were brackets holding up glass panels,  the brackets were cut out for the glass and consisted of like 5 or 6 separate brushes, it looked fine and all but there were dozens of these brackets.  In the end I found a way to do it with one brush each.

I dunno just how similar to mapping modeling is, but there are a ton of things you can do to simplify your model and get the polygon count down without cutting it down to one piece


Although...  after seeing that picture replay a few times,  I don't wanna push you too hard
Take the weekend off,  make a dick and balls rocket or a grenade that actually looks like a pineapple and come back fresh 

[|iR|Focalor]

I just think that if you design something one way, that's just how it should look when you stick it into the game. But that ain't the way shit works with Q2. And yeah, that's the problem here, I'm trying to be too detailed I guess. I kinda forget that before Quake2 hit the scene, every model in video games before it looked abso-fuckin-lutely horrible, and that's only if it were a "real" 3d engine. Games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior, none of those were really 3d, they were just 2d images propped up on a 3d plane. So it's like trying to build a modern house with modern architectural features with stone-age tools, standing back when you're done, and going "What the hell? Why is the door crooked?" Because it's just GONNA be! I don't really like it, but it is what it is. Just gotta learn to dumb the design down as much as possible. Too many fine lines in too small a space ain't gonna turn out worth a shit.

So I don't think I'm gonna give up on this model just yet. Gonna redesign the sword handles with fewer angles and curves and see how much I can simplify it.

edit: ALL of the "too much detail" was in the sword handles. Just to show you what that was... the first version of the model where I had only one sword handle included and one Slayer logo on one side was...
470 vertices / 834 triangles
Once I duplicate the sword handle another 3 times and duplicate the Slayer logo too, it becomes...
1442 vertices / 2656 triangles - LOL!
With NO sword handles at all, just the cylinder with Slayer logos on both sides, it becomes...
370 vertices / 552
Which means each sword adds 268 vertices and 526 triangles.

Yyyyyyeah. That's kinda ridiculous. Those kinda numbers would probably jive in a game made after '07 all day everyday, but not Q2. Not unless you completely revamped the engine to use something besides MD2. And I think that APRq2 (and possibly R1q2) can use MD3's if you want to, but I'm assuming that MD3 probably has limitations similar to MD2. And even if they don't, I've already tried to export from MilkShape to MD3 just to see what it would produce, and I have no idea what the QC file is supposed to look like to export it properly, so it didn't work.

For example, this is what the QC file for MD2's looks like for MilkShape, pretty straightforward:

// Sample MD2 config, copy into export directory
$modelname models/items/quaddama/tris.md2
$origin 0.0 0.0 0.0

// skins
$skinwidth 256
$skinheight 256
$skin models/items/quaddama/skin.pcx
$skin pain.pcx

// sequences
$sequence Frame 1
$sequence

And this is what a MD3 QC file looks like:

// model <modelname> <outputfilename>
$model "models/model.md3"
$parentjoint "Pelvis"
$frames 0 0
$flags 0
$numskins 0

// tags <tagname> <ms3djointname>
$tag "tag_name1" "Joint01"
$tag "tag_name2" "Joint02"
$tag "tag_name3" "Joint03"

// mesh <meshname> <ms3dgroupname>
$mesh h_head h_head
$skin models/skin01.pcx
$flags 0

// mesh <meshname> <ms3dgroupname>
$mesh h_head h_head
$skin models/skin01.pcx
$flags 0

Not familiar with Q3 modding or paks at all, never done it, so I have no idea what I'm looking at here.

[|iR|Focalor]

The chunkier, uglier re-design. Tried to cut down on sides to all shapes everywhere I possibly could.



Before: 268 vertices / 526 triangles
After: 105 vertices / 200 triangles

[Whirlingdervish]

One thing you can do, which I recommend to any mapper who will listen, is use artful texturing to fake the rounding and details wherever possible to minimize the number of tris.
The limitations of the q2 renderer apply to maps and models equally.

When you skin that sword hilt, attempt some smooth gradients in photoshop to shade the roundness back into the handle and pommel etc. You can make the finished product look really rounded or make things look like they have gooves that dont exist with the correct use of contrast and shading in the skin painting. It's a real bitch to do since each face is a different little painting that has to line up with the next one but once you get it down it will save you a lot of headaches.

If you look at the stock player models in the editor you'll see how very few polys can be used with the right shading of the skin to trick you into seeing a rounder head or shoulder than is actually there.

[Jay Dolan]

MD2 supports up to 2048 unique verts defining up to 4096 tris:
https://github.com/AndreyNazarov/q2pro/blob/9d709fb9ccd4ca54be38d9b909c4517cbc0a6ebf/inc/format/md2.h#L33

Still, like Whirling says, with proper texturing, you'd be surprised how low-poly you can make your meshes. For example, the qforcer player model in Quake2World is around 1200 tris.



While he's an MD3, his geometry is well within the limits of even MD2. Just food for thought.

[The Happy Friar]

Doom 3 models were relatively low poly too (especially compared to other big games for it's day).  The textures+normal maps are what made them look more detailed then they were.

You may think you're loosing detail but, once in game, nobody will notice that lack of detail on that handle unless it's stared at for more then several seconds.  If someone is, they're not playing, they're camping. 

Not 100% if it can be done with items, but with player/monster models you can define up to 4 separate models per entity.  So the player can have four models, that would quadruple the # of verts & poly's.  You'd need to modify code though.  But perhaps another way around it (Knightmare Q2 ups the limit, for example).

[PANTONE 7717C]

I wouldn't use Quark for anything else than mapmaking to be honest. For any kind of editing of things like playermodels and skins I use MilkShape for the building and for the Export to MD2 I use Q2Modeler (which is quite a decent tool if you know how to use it). I looked around in my old backup archives knowing I had saved some old links to a very basic Q2modeler tutorial, which still seem to work; Q2MTutorial1, Q2MTutorial2, Q2MTutorial3