Copyright: Copyright 1997 Help Express


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Welcome to the Quake 2 Modeller

This is an short introduction and overview of the Quake 2 Modeller. As indicated by the title, the sole pupose of this program is the creation and modification of Quake 2 Model files.

The progam has many similarities from other 3D modelling and animation tools, with the standard Front, Right, Top, and Camera Views available, and also with a complete set of creation and modifcation tools.

The program and user interface has not been designed with the absolute novice user in mind. Some tasks that are easy to perform in other programs may be difficult to acheive in this progra, and also vice versa. In truth, this program is not intended to replace all the other 3D editors out there. Every modeller / animator each has their own preference in tools, and the aim of this program is to supplement those in order to streamline the process of creating .MD2 files.

With that in mind, the biggest feature of this program would be the ability to import .ASC (and other formats coming soon) and being able to save them to a Quake 2 format. No need to bother with scripts or any other junk, just select and go. The next step after this would be skin manuipulation, which is a big focus in this application. Skin editing functions just like the 3D editor, selecting, scaling, rotating and moving vertices about to achieve the desired result.

All this doesnt mean the 3D editor has not been left behind. A complete vertex and face creation/manipulation system is in place, and bone deformation is soon to be added (its almost done infact, it just needs to be tested and refined).

Stuff to Read:

Things you need to know...

Viewing Model Files

      Viewing .MD2 files

      Moving the views about

      Changing How the Model is displayed

Editing your Model files

      Basic Manipulation

      More Complex Stuff

      Chopping and Changing

Making Models from Scratch

      The First Step

      Extending the basics

Skins

      Making the Basic Skin Mesh

      Other Skin Meshing Stuff

Other Features

      The memo window

      Generate Header files

Whats all the Stuff on the Screen? and Whats it do?

      The 3D Editor

            Create Panel (yet to be implemented fully)

            Modify Panel

            Bones Panel (yet to be implemented fully)

            View Panel


Things to know
Things You Need to Know...

There are several things that should be made apparent for this program.

Display Mode: Unfortunately, you should run the Modeller in 16bit color, otherwise the colors in the modeller wont look quite right.

The Quake 2 Modeller does not use the Quake 2 format (.MD2) as its main form of storage. The modeller uses a file with an extension of .AQM, short for Advanced Quake Model. There are two major differences in these two formats:

•	In the .MD2 files, all the vertex information is in whole numbers. This was most probably done to conserve memory usage. This means a loss of accuracy in any model that is saved. The AQM format uses floating point numbers to store all the information (including skin vertices), so there is no loss of accuracy.

•	In Quake 1, the skins of the models were embedded in the model files themselves. In Quake 2, the skins are in separate files. Originally, this program was used to edit Quake 1 files, and this is one legacy of that.

Because of the separate skins in Quake 2, whenever a .MD2 file is loaded, the modeller will attempt to load the skins. For the skins to load correctly, the base working path must be set. Go to Options|Configure, and change the path to your BaseQ2 directory. Also note thast this program will not go looking for skins inside .pak files.

The big panel on the left hand side contains many of the functions available in this program. The four tabs are, from left to right, Create, Modify, Bones, and View. The basic tools for modification (Select, Move, Scale, and Rotate) appear on the Modify, Bones, and View tabs, but not on the Create tab.

Another fairly important thing to note when editing anything: All selection activity is additive by default, and subtractive by holding down alt. This may seem a bit unusual to get used to at first, but it is much more fluid in most cases once you get used to it.

Oh, by the way, there is no Undo feature currently implemented. Sorry.


Viewing Models
Viewing .MD2 Files

The first step is to make sure the correct base path is set for your models. If you are just looking at the Quake 2 models, go to Options|Configure, and change the Base Path to your Quake2\baseq2 directory. This will ensure the skins are loaded correctly.

Go to File|Open, and navigate to a directory containing some .md2 files. Select a file, and click Open to load it.

The model should have appeared centred in the four views, Front, Right, Top, and the Camera. All of these should be wireframe views.

The two blue triangles near the bottom left corner of the window are used to move throught frames of animation available in the model. Click on the buttons, and they will either advance or go back 1 frame at a time. The red number is the current number of the frame you are on, and the text below it is the name of the frame.

Also, the Slider at the bottom of the screen will navigate through the frames quickly without going through any dialogs. This will not work while playing an animation.

Going forward and back frames can also be achieved by the - and = keys (next to the top row of numbers).

You can also right click on these buttons, and doing so will put you at the start or at the end of the animation frames. Right-clicking on the name of the current frame will display a list of available frames, and double clicking on one will instantly jump to that frame.

To play through these animations, change to the View Tab, and push the button "Play Camera". This will cause the camera to cycle through the first ten frames of animation  (if there are that many). There are three controls to modify the behaviour of the playing, the speed of the animation, and the range of frames to play. To change the speed of the animation, just click the tiny up or down arrows next to the FPS, and the speed will vary accordingly.

To change the playable range of the animation, click the small up and down arrows for each of the respective range limits. As an alternative, you can right-click on the up or down arrows, and a list of frame numbers, and their names will appear, and you can choose what frame you like.

Skins

To view the skins of the model, goto View|Skins, and a window containg the skin, and its mesh will appear. Just click on the blue triangles to chage between the skins.


Moving the Views
Moving the Views About

It is all very well having this fantasic model loading, but what happens if it goes off the screen? No worries...

First, change to the Pan Views tool (the button is located at the bottom right) and move the mouse over the Front, right, or Top views. The mouse cursor should have changed to a hand.

Now hold down the left mouse button, and move the mouse about. The view your mouse is currently over should move around with your mouse.  Instead, hold down your right mouse button, and move the mouse up and down, but not too much.. This is one way of zooming in and out. The keys . and , can also be used to zoom in and out.

Now move the mouse to the camera view, and repreat the left and right mouse button dragging. The left-mouse button will rotate the view around what the other three views are looking at, and the right will zoom in and out from that point.

To centre the four views on the model, click the "Fit All" button located at the bottom left.


Changing the model Display
Changing How the Model is displayed

Camera View

When the program loads, all the four views are in wireframe mode. While funcitonal, this is not very pretty to look at, so the camera view as two other modes with which to display the model. These are Flat Shaded, and Texture Mapped.

Flat Shaded will display the model according to two light sources, and as the name describes, each polygon drawn is flat and is also gray. Any selected polygons in this mode show up in yellow.

Texture Mapped will make the current skin (changeable in the Skin Editor) visible on the model. Any Selected Faces will show up a yellow textured color.

These modes can be changed on the keyboard, with 1, 2, and 3 for Wireframe, Flat Shaded, and Texture Mapped respectively.

For the wireframe camera view, you have probably notices there are far fewer lines drawn than the other views. This is becuase the program does not display any face that is facing away from camera. To toggle the drawing of these faces, go Options|3D View|Draw Backfaces. Alternatively, you can press D

Other Views

The drawing of backfaces can also be toggles for the 2D views, and this can be found at Options|2D View|Draw Backfaces, or you an push Shift+D.

In this menu, you will also see three other menu items, like Play Camera XY. Normally, when the camera is playing through a sequence of animations, only the camera is updated. You can also have any of the 2D views playing a the same time. Player Camera XY toggles the top view animation, and ZY for front, and XZ for right.

All Views

There are many drawing settings that effect all the views.

Vertices Ticks: All the vertices in the model are drawn as tiny crosses.

Show Origin: This draws a semi-big cross at the co-ordinates (0,0,0).

Show Gird (disabled): Draws a grid of variable size in each view.

Show Normals: This has three possible options: None, Selected, and All. All will draw the normal of every face, Selected will draw the normals of selected faces, and None will draw no normals.

There are three buttons in the View tab which also effect how a model is displayed. These are Hide Selected, Hide Unselected, and UnHide all. These are explained in the Model Manipulation Section, under More Complex Stuff.


Basic Manipulation
Basic Model Manipulation

There are two main things that define how manipulation of a model will work. These are the Currently selected tool, and the Selection Mode.

The currently selected tool defines what actions will happen when you click the mouse, and the Selection Mode defines what will be effected when you do so.

There are three Selection modes: Vertex, Face, and Bone. When Vertex is selected, all opeations work on vertices, when Face is selected, all operations work on the triangles, and Bones works only on bones. When Face mode is selected,  an extra number of buttons appear on the modify panel, and these are described in the More Complex Stuff section.

There are Four basic tools: Select, Move, Rotate and Scale.

Select: When this tool is active, Clicking somewhere on the model will cause any vertex or face under the mouse to be selected. Anything selected will be drawn in yellow. clicking and dragging will produce a box, when the mouse button is released, any vertex or face in the box will be selected.

To deselect items, hold down the alt key, and click or drag the mouse over some vertices, and they will be deselected and no longer be drawn in yellow.

In the Edit menu, there are five selection tools: Select All, Select None, Select Inverse, Select Connected, and Select Touching.

Select All ( A ): This will select everything of the current Selection Type and draw them in yellow.

Select None ( / ): This will deselect everything.

Select Inverse ( I ): This will select anything that is not selected, and deselect what was selected.

Select Connected ( ] ): This will select any vertices or faces that are connected in some way by a triangle. This is useful if you would like to move an entire gun, but only some of it sticks out from the model hlding it. Just select any vertex or vertices on the gun, and push Select Connected, and all the vertices or triangles that are a part of the gun will be selected.

Select Toucing ( [ ): This is similar to Select Connected, but will only select vertices or tiangles that are directly adjacent to the current selection. This is useful for select limbs. Select a foot or a hand, and push Select Toucing a couple of times, and The whole leg should be selected.

Move: With this tool active, the act of holding down the left mouse button, and dragging it will cause the current selection to me moved along with the mouse pointer. However, if nothing of the current Selection Mode is selected, the Selection tool will be enabled for the duration of the click and drag. This allows you to manipulation many different vertices quickly.

The three buttons, marked X, Y and Z that are below the four tool directly effect what happens with the move, Rotate, and Scale tools.

The Z button will not effect the Moving Tool at all. If the X button is depressed, it will allow sideways movement when moving vertices and faces around. If the Y button is depressed it will allow vertical movement.

Rotate: This tool will rotate any selection vertices or faces. To use it, hold down the mouse button in any of the 2D views, and move the mouse up and down. This will cause the selected vertices or faces to be rotated will the mouse cursor used as the centre of rotation.

The X, Y, and Z buttons do not effect the rotate tool.

Scale: The scale tool will resize the selection of vertices or triangles. hold down the left mouse button and move the mouse up and down. This will resize the selection depending on if X, Y and Z are depressed. X will allow the model to be scale left and right. Y will allow the model to be scale in the forwards and backwards direction. Z will allow the model to be scale upwards and downwards.


More Complex Stuff
More Complex Editing

The four basic tools are all very good for doing simlpe things, but there are other essential tools of mesh editing and creation.

The Mirror Tool does just that, it mirrors all the selected vertices or triangles along the axis specified by the X, Y and Z buttons.

Having the X button is depressed, the selection will be mirrored horizontally in relation to the front. If the Y button is depressed, the selection will be mirrored vertically in relation to the front. If the Z button is depressed, the selection  will be mirrored horizontally relative to the right hand side.

When the selection mode is set to faces, extra buttons appear on the modify panel. these are Flip Normals, Turn Edge, Subdivide, and Extrude.

Flip Normals: This reverses the direction each selected triangle is facing. This is used when Quake and the modeller decides which triangles to draw, and any triangles that are facing away are automatically not drawn.

Turn Edge (not implemented yet): If you select two triangles tocuhing each other, you would have selection a four sided figure, with a line joining two of the vertices. This tool will switch the line to travle between the other two vertices.

Subdivide (not implemented yet): This takes each selected triangle, and divides it up into three triangles.

Extrude: This will take the selection and give the selection depth. When clicked, a dialog box appears asking the length required for the extrusion. The direction determined by the average of all the normals in the selection. If the model has more than one frame of animation, the extrusion will be calculated separately for each frame, so the faces a extruded in the correct direction.

Del. Selected: The delete selected button will delete the current selection. If some vertices are selected, and then deleted, those vertices will be deleted, along with any triange that uses those vertices. If a selection of triangles are deleted, all the selected triangles are removed, and the user is prompted if they wish any isolated (unused b any triangles) vertices to be deleted.

Effect Frame Range: This allows any modications made (move, rotations, scaling, or mirroring)


Chopping and Changing

In addition to the editing tool outlined previously, the Quake 2 Modeller has a powerful cut and paste system. However, it should be noted that this program does not use the windows clipboard.

Copying And Pasting

The first step is to select the vertices or faces you wish to copy. Please note that the selection mode that was used when the selection was copied will be used when it is pasted, no matter what the selection mode has chaged to.

After choosing Paste from the menu, a dialog appears asking how to paste the copied part to the model.

The first option, Replace the Vertices, will change all vertices in the current frame, that have the same number as the selected vertices in the copy. This is a rather difficult thing to explain, but is extremely useful tool. An example of doing this is below.

 Important: You should never, unless you are absolutley sure it is correct, Copy something from one model, and Paste using Replace vertices on a different model. The results are undefined, and may cause the program to crash. Is is fine to do this using Append Vertices, but not with Replace Vertices or with Paste to Range.

Example of replacing the vertices: Suppose you are doing a humanoid model, who his standings still, but is looking left and right. For a convincing animation, the whole body, right down to the feet, must move a twist properly. After this animation is done, there is usually some unwanted movement in the feet. Because the feet are firmly planted on the ground, the part of the foot touching the ground should not move at all. to achcieve this, pick a frame where the position of the feet is correct. Now, using vertices or faces (it doesnt matter), select the two feet, and psuh Edit|Copy Selected (Ctrl+C) . No goto the next frame (=). Click Edit|Paste Selected (Ctrl+V) and make sure Replace the Vertices is selected, and the Blend Factor is 100. Push OK. On the model, the vertices of the foot have been replaced by the correct location for them. Repeat this for every frame, and you will have perfect non-moving feet.

Whats this Blend Factor rubbish?

The blend factor is the percentage of weighting that the copy has when pasting. If the Blend Factor was 100%, the vertices are pasted directly on the model. If Blend Factor was 50%, the vertices old and new locations are averaged, and if it was 0%, no change would be made.

Appending the Vertices

When the Paste dialog Box appears, there is a second option, Append the Vertices. After pushing okay, this will produce a copy of the original selection. This also works between models. So you can copy the gun from one model, and paste it onto another. The skin mesh is also copied.

Paste To Range

The other pasting option in the menu, is Paste to Range. This is the same as the normal paste with Replace Vertices, but it will apply the past to a range of frames. This is an easier alternative for the example given for Replace Vertices.


Creating Models, The First Step

When creating a model, there are basically two elements with which a model is made. These are vertices and triangles. The vertices are the points, or corners of a model in 3d space,  and a triangel is defined by three vertices.

Creating Vertices

To create a vertex, goto the Create Panel, and click Create Vertex. Now go and click on one of the 2D views, A blue cross will appear where you just click. Go to a different view and click again. Once more the blue cross follows. The blue cross is where the vertex will be created. When you are happy with the positioning of the vertex, push ENTER, and a a vertex will be created.

TIP: You should have Vertices Ticks checked when doing this, it makes it much easier to see what is happening.

Building Faces:

The next step is joining all these wonderful vertices together. Go to the Create Planel, and click Build Face. Now, move the mouse over one of the vertices you made (it doesn;t matter what view it is in now) And click the left mouse button. When you move the mouse around now, a blue line will be drawn from the vertex you just clicked to the mouse pointer. Move the mouse over another vertex and click the left mouse button. Repeat this once more. Now a triangle has been made!.

Note: When making tiangles, the order that you click the vertices is very important. The order they have been selected in determines which way the triangle faces. If you want the triangle to face the view, then select them in a clockwise direction, and if you want the triangle to be facing awat, select them in an anti-clickwise direction.

Creating Primitives (Not implemented Yet)

Primitives are the name of the group of shapes that are the basic building blocks of stuff. Some of these include spheres, cones, cylinders, cubes, toruses (or is that torii? :).

Using these will be implemented in a later version.


Extending the Basics

Although creating every single vertexl will provide the most control when creating a model, it is also the most time consuming method.

There are some extra tools availabe when making models, and these are located in the Modify panel. These tools may not seem very much at first, but they are indeed useful for making models.

For definitions of these tool, see the More Complex Editing Section.

Subdivide will split a triangle up into three. This allows extra detail to be added in on an existing mesh. Just click a face, click Subdivide, and the face will be split into three, and modificaiton of that extra vertex will easily change the detail

Extruding a face, or a selection of faces will give depth to a triangle. This is exrtemely useful. If you have  the top part of a leg drawn, simple comver up the end of the partially drawn leg, and extrude the end faces. Slight modification of the produced vertices will make the libm appear non-symmetrical, and in under a couple of minutes, you have an acceptable leg drawn.

Using these tools, and the modication one (like copying and pasting, mirroring rotation etc) you can quite quickly make a model.


Making the Basic Skin Mesh

As was stated in the introduciton, the skin mesh creation and editing was focued upon, and predictibly is very different from any other program.

Creating the Skin Mesh

When making the skin mesh, the skin editor will grab the triangles out of the 3D editor, and place them on the skin. therefore, have a basic, easy to work with pose that will allow a decent skin mesh to be made from.

For a simple mesh, do the following:

1. Select all the triangles in the 3D editor (make sure you are in Face mode)

2. Switch to the Skin Editor

3. Goto Edit|Get Position From Model, and a dialog box will appear.

4. Choose "Get faces only from direction" and then choose "from back".

5. Move the newly created vertices out the way (they are already selected)

6. goto Edit|Get Position From Model, and then choose "from front"

After these steps, a simple, Quake 1 like skin will be produced. Any of the vertices and faces can be edited in the same way as in the 3D editor. They can be move, scales, rotated mirrored or whatever. This also include the Select Connected, and the Select Touching tools. Very useful these.

TIP: When modifying the skin mesh you should have the 3D editor on textured mode. That view will be updated whenever the skin is updated.

After this is done, goto File|Export Image, and this will make a .bmp file with which you can edit your skin. At the moment, you can only save .bmp files, and only import .pcx files, this will be fixed in the future.

After making the skin, goto File|Select Image, and load the skin, and go back to the 3D Editor to have a look at the model.


Other Skin Meshing Stuff

After the basic skin mesh has been made, a fairly useful tool can now be used. This is called Selection Syncing.

Selection Syncing

This fancily named tool does something fairly simple. If both the 3D Editor and the Skin Editor are in Face mode, the selection of the Skin Triangles and the 3D triangles will be kept the same. If you select an arm in the Skin Editor, the arm will be selected in the 3D editor, and vice-versa.

Re-getting the Skin Mesh

After the basic skin mesh has been created, it is unlikely that it will suffice for an MD2 model. The next step is separating some of the bits of the model (like the head and arms).

To achieve this, select one part you wish separated and repeat the re-get the mesh for the front and back again. And mvoe them to the proper location.

Weld Vertices:

This tool will take any selected vertices and make them into one, combining all the faces as well. This is useful for koing up stuff so you get a seamless skin.