QuakeForge 0.7.0 released.

[qbism]

Turns out I was grabbing the file from the top of the qf download page (old version) instead of new version at sourceforge. Well, at least I learned about mesh.faces vs. mesh.tessfaces and how compatibility is broken with each 0.01 release increment of Blender. I will say the changes are well documented.

Anyhow, CTRL-J worked for exporting multiple meshes. For UV, all meshes must be mapped to the same texture. Also I haven't tried animation.

It was great to see the mdl nicely mapped in Quark!

This is not the clearest example, but it's 7 or 8 separate meshes. It's a partially complete player model. Vweps look weird because they're all on at the same time. This is what it looks like in Blender, and then in Quark after export. Only one vwep was selected for export, and it adopted the image from the first mesh. Normally it would be exported separately, anyway.

[taniwha]

Turns out I was grabbing the file from the top of the qf download page (old version) instead of new version at sourceforge.

Hmm, I'll re-arrange the QF downloads page: both versions are there (which might be the problem: maybe I should just nuke the old links).

Considering Quake's palette, the export looks pretty good. Also, nice model. It reminds me a bit of the little robot in Anachronox.

As for the animations: there are two ways: frame 1 to current (ala leileilol), or using a script (try importing player.mdl and check the "player" text block is probably the easiest way (you get docs + sample)). The text block to use is specified in the QF MDL panel of the Object tab.

Actually, I just looked at the page and only now noticed the old snapshot. *NUKE* I'll nuke the 0.7.0 link, too.

[edit] Thanks for the heads-up to the page issues.

[taniwha]

qbism: I've taken a look at what ctrl-j does with uvs and textures: it seems that as far as blender is concerned, one might as well not have pressed ctrl-j: no visible difference.

While doing the merge automatically is a bit more that what I want to tackle just now, I can look into pulling into the one image texels from each image specified by the uv faces. I'm sure things will get nasty if the artist doesn't ensure the uvfaces using different images don't overlap, but I think it will go a long way towards making the addon at least usable.

[qbism]

qbism: I've taken a look at what ctrl-j does with uvs and textures: it seems that as far as blender is concerned, one might as well not have pressed ctrl-j: no visible difference.

While doing the merge automatically is a bit more that what I want to tackle just now, I can look into pulling into the one image texels from each image specified by the uv faces. I'm sure things will get nasty if the artist doesn't ensure the uvfaces using different images don't overlap, but I think it will go a long way towards making the addon at least usable.

Ctrl-J is probably doing the "right thing" by not messing with UVs. For the robot, multiple meshes were already mapped to a single texture. Combining textures seems like a handy general-use tool for Blender that's not specific to mdl, I wonder if anyone wrote one for 2.6x?

I will try animation next.

[taniwha]

Indeed, blender does the "right thing" by not touching the uvface textures. Unfortunately, that won't work for mdl (it would, however, work for iqm).

It seems that if the materials are setup properly (textures, uvs, etc), everything can be baked into the one texture. I've begun playing with this with, so far, rather mixed results.

[leileilol]

I'll try the new version soon

also, thank you, because usually, authors of Blender export scripts rarely acknowledge existence of bugs (like the shipped MD2 export that doesn't work in Quake2 and the PSK export that doesn't work in UnrealEd3). This is one of the few i've seen that is actively maintained and properly tested without a "submit a patch" attitude.



A project may be revived because of the script

[taniwha]

Well, I may or may not have been like that in the past, but these days even "I don't know how to use it" is a bug As for patches, if I feel the person might be capable of doing so, I might suggest that sending me a patch will be faster, but only if I'm busy with something else, and even then, fixing the problem is often a nice break ("a change is as good as a holiday").

A project may be revived because of the script

Now that is great news. I've done something that might be useful

[Baker]

Nothing of interest to say, but I keep reading the Blender export talk discussion ...

/Exits stage left. Thread followers +1

[qbism]

Indeed, blender does the "right thing" by not touching the uvface textures. Unfortunately, that won't work for mdl (it would, however, work for iqm).

It seems that if the materials are setup properly (textures, uvs, etc), everything can be baked into the one texture. I've begun playing with this with, so far, rather mixed results.

Hmm, I didn't notice any issues. I imported the model as an .obj that had been created and UV-mapped in wings3d. All the meshes of the body were mapped to the same image from the beginning. I did texture painting in Blender. The texture is 256x256 tga. The mapping is very disjointed but it works. [edit -insert a 'return']

[taniwha]

I don't see anything in there for your character's weapons.

Here is what I've found out so far for getting good results when combining models:

• You very much want to use properly setup materials (relying on uvface textures won't work)
• Multiple materials works well
• Your materials do not need to have a texture.
• You will need two uvmaps
  • source map that is be the result of hitting ctrl-j on multiple meshes and will look like a mess, but don't touch it.
  • destination map: this will start as a copy of the source map (done by adding a uvmap in the mesh data panel). Tidy this up to get the final layout you wish.
• create a new image in the uv-image editor.
• mess around with your uvmap selection (I'm still uncertain on this part) and (I think) select "selected to active" in the bake panel in the render tab
• Select "Textures" in the "Bake Mode" selector.
• Hit the "Bake" button.

With that, you should have a single texture that is the merge of all your other textures and even diffuse-only material colors. With this procedure, you can produce a texture for models that have no textures, only colored materials, or you can use blender's procedural textures in your quake models.

At this stage, it seems to be beyond automation, but if there's a way to get a nice uv layout for the destination uvmap without editing uvs by hand, then it should be possible.

I need to experiment some more, but it seems baking materials to a texture for subsurfaced models might make the texture such that the low-poly model [/i]looks[/i] high-poly (I'd be surprised if it didn't, since that's the whole point of baking normals).

[edit]I forgot to mention that it seems your source textures can be any mix of resolutions: it seems blender to do the right thing for resampling the source textures into the destination texture.

[taniwha]

Ok, for those able to use git, I've just pushed a change to the export script that makes it use the active UV map rather than the first. This means that when exporting a model made from joining several meshes, you won't have to do anything silly like deleting the first UV map: just make sure the UV map used for baking is active (it will be after doing the bake). I might add a "uvmap" item to the export script.

As it turns out, it is very possible to get a nice UV map from joined meshes without any hand editing: bpy.ops.uv.pack_islands(). It even has a margin option, but I don't understand its meaning: it ranges from 0 to 1, but 1 what? I couldn't tell by eye-balling the result. However, I'm not sure I want to try to automate the process as one of my goals for the exporter is it does not modify anything. Automating mesh combination while avoiding modifying any existing data would require building a whole new object.

[qbism]

I don't see anything in there for your character's weapons.

Yes, that's the one mesh that does have a separate material/UV. Just wanted to see how it was handled by default. Typically that would be exported as a separate mdl (vwep), anyway.

Blender simply plastered the UV on top of the 'primary' texture (determined by the first UV selected I suppose). It's easy to see how these could be rearranged as you describe.

[motorsep]

Does Quake MDL Blender add-on work with 2.69 and 2.71+ ?