Jello Models :(

Downsider · Post by **Downsider** » Sat Nov 29, 2008 7:12 pm

Just wondering if there's a lightweight model format that I can use in my engine that would get rid of the "jello effect" that's so ugly in animated models with interpolation.

I'm not sure what it's due to, but I believe it's due to 8bit positions of vertices or something?

frag.machine · Post by **frag.machine** » Sat Nov 29, 2008 8:34 pm

It's a side effect from encoding floats into bytes. Really a poor design decision IMHO, since the disk space gain is irrelevant and internally even software Quake ends up using floats to store vertices anyway. I'd suggest MD3 as a simple and well known/supported model format not suffering this problem (at least, not as much as MDL or MD2), but I suspect many people here would disagree.

Downsider · Post by **Downsider** » Sat Nov 29, 2008 9:00 pm

Mhmm, well I'm looking to go with as little CPU intensity and blah blah as possible. The target device isn't exactly a PC.

ceriux · Post by **ceriux** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 3:44 am

think there's a way to make quake load up regular model types like obj and such? maybe one of those would work out good?

leileilol · Post by **leileilol** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 12:44 pm

Downsider wrote:Mhmm, well I'm looking to go with as little CPU intensity and blah blah as possible. The target device isn't exactly a PC.

If it has a sucky FPU, then don't even think about MD3.

Urre · Post by **Urre** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 12:46 pm

Afaik their target is the PSP

Downsider · Post by **Downsider** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 2:04 pm

Urre wrote:Afaik their target is the PSP

Well it's not a secret. If somebody were to ask me..

frag.machine · Post by **frag.machine** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 6:28 pm

Downsider wrote:Mhmm, well I'm looking to go with as little CPU intensity and blah blah as possible. The target device isn't exactly a PC.

You can try using a short instead a byte to store the compressed float. I think MD2 already does that in fact.

frag.machine · Post by **frag.machine** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 7:29 pm

Downsider wrote:Mhmm, well I'm looking to go with as little CPU intensity and blah blah as possible. The target device isn't exactly a PC.

Again, I know a lot of people will hate the idea, but have you checked the native Milkshape3D format ? Looks pretty simple to work and not exactly hungry for hardware resources.

Urre · Post by **Urre** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 9:20 pm

MD2 is just as Jello as MDL, unfortunately. Afaik, MD3 should do perfectly fine, as long as the renderer isn't software, which admittedly it might be on the PSP. I'm not sure, but I recall hearing something about MD3 being hard to implement on software renderers. Spike might know

Electro · Post by **Electro** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 10:24 pm

The psp graphics api is fairly close to opengl. If they're doing quake in software then they're MAD.

Downsider · Post by **Downsider** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 10:38 pm

Urre wrote:MD2 is just as Jello as MDL, unfortunately. Afaik, MD3 should do perfectly fine, as long as the renderer isn't software, which admittedly it might be on the PSP. I'm not sure, but I recall hearing something about MD3 being hard to implement on software renderers. Spike might know

Nah, its not software. It's hardware, and it IS very similar to OpenGL, in fact.

Alright, so MD3 is the format of choice. This also has tagging, right?

So, nice.

Any documentation on this format? I'm not into hit-and-miss programming.

Urre · Post by **Urre** » Mon Dec 01, 2008 12:18 am

There should be lots of documentation on MD3 around