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Modelling and Skinning tips

Screenshots from Lightwave 3D and QuakeMe

3D Modelling and Animation

I am not going to go into too much detail on 3D Modelling and animation. If you need more help than I offer here, you will need to learn a few modelling basics. This is a topic in itself and way too comprehensive to cover here. Feel free to email me if you have some specific questions.

I use Lightwave 3D v5 for modelling and animating models for quake. All of the models in X-MEN Quake are created specifically and individually for each character. I use bones to animate the meshes.
I will be describing some methods for doing things here that I have found to be the best. These methods are for Lightwave, Util3D, and QuakeMe, and not necessarily useful for other modellers or editors.

When first creating your model, keep an eye on the polygon count. As you will be creating the model with quads, double the count for the total number. Apparently if your models are over 500 poly's they slow the game considerably, so keep them simple. The player model is 408 poly's (including weapons) and my models for X-MEN Quake are all around 400 poly's. This seems to be a good number, allowing for enough detail while not slowing the game. Remember to triangulate your model once it is finished.

I had some difficulties with scale. I originally created my models to the scale of the player mesh that I had extracted. These ended up being way too big. But then when I scaled them down, the texture that was created was too small. I finally created the base frame to the scale of the player mesh, which gave me a good texture size, and scaled the animation frames to 0.4 of the base, which made the MDL the right scale for the game.

When animating, preview at 6 frames per second. This is approximately the speed you will see the animation within Quake. Testing your animation in QuakeMe can be deceiving, as it animates fairly slowly. I have just got QMe, the new version of QuakeMe and this has greatly improved on the speed.

The 3D Studio exporter plugin for Lightwave seems to have a serious bug in that the 3DS model created will have all the normals flipped. You need to flip all the normals before exporting so the 3DS model has correct normals. This applies to your base frame also, so that your texture base is correct.

Know your character well, you need to know what animation sets are used the most, and what order they are used in. This will enable you to create as close to seamless transitions as possible.

Spend time getting your bones right. This will effect your whole animation for good or bad.

Skins / Texures

Creating skins is what most of you will be doing so I will go into a bit more detail in this section. Some points will only apply if you're creating new models rather than skinning existing models.

Here is the Quake palette. This is the palette that ideally you would create your skin in, but if you create your skin in thousands or millions of colors, this is the palette that you will need to convert to. There are some specific color regions that need mention.
The first area highlighted in pink is the SHIRT color for the player MDL, the second highlighted in blue is the PANTS color. If you are creating a skin for the player, keep in mind that when you change shirt or pants colors within quake, any portion of your skin using these colors will change also. This can be used to great advantage, or can ruin an otherwise good skin. If you are unsure of how to use these colors well, just avoid them all together.
The last 32 colors highlighted in brown, are the full bright colors. The areas of your skin that use these colors will remain at full brightness even when your model is in complete darkness. These colors can be used to good effect for eyes, or for instance Cyclops visor, or anything that gives out it's own light. Make sure that no other part of the skin uses these colors, or the model will look very weird when in the shadows.

You'll notice that I mentioned the possibility of creating your skin in thousands, or millions of colors. Some people will recommend doing this, I definitly do not. There are so many complications when creating the skins in more colors, or even a different palette to the Quake palette. All the color areas mentioned above need to be carefully used or avoided as the case may be. You cannot tell a painting program when reducing to the Quake palette from milliions of colors to just avoid these colors. It will use all of the colors wherever it can, mixing up your shirt colors, pants colors, and full bright colors with your normal colors. You would then need to go in and check every pixel to make sure it was using the right color. This could take you as long as it took to create the skin in the first place.
All of this extra work is easily avoided by using the Quake palette from the beginning. You'll also have total control of the dithering, only putting it in where it is really needed, rather than the automatic dithering that can sometimes look very bad.

The first step to creating your skin is to generate the base image from your base frame. Use "Texmake" with your base frame to create your [image].LBM. I use Deluxe Animator to convert the LBM to PCX, which I then bring into Animator Pro to edit. If you don't have Deluxe Paint or Deluxe Animator, there are shareware utilities to convert from LBM to other formats. Always keep a copy of this to refer to so you can see where features should be in relation to the model.
If you're skinning an existing MDL, then use the existing image as your base. This can be exported from QuakeMe.

Next color the character with the basic features in place, keeping it flat color so you can change it easily. Open up your MDL in QuakeMe and import your new BMP. Rotate the model and make sure that all the features that you have created are in the right places. If not, edit and test it again, until it's right. At this stage you will notice that without any shadows or shading it looks very flat, but this will be fixed in the following steps.

Now you need to detail your skin so that it looks really cool and realistic. If you leave it as flat color, it will appear more like a silluette than a 3 dimensional figure.
Start by blocking in the detail, in this case muscles. You're basically creating the areas of greatest shadow. Make sure that you use a darker version of the color that you're creating the detail over. I usually only create one side, then mirror it for the other side, of course you can only do this if your model is symmetrical. Keep in mind at this stage that you want the light coming from above the object, so your shadows are going to be on the underside of features.

You should have a pretty good basis now to start shading. This is the most important part of the skin, and takes the most time. Start by creating your highlights where they are needed, typically on the upper side of muscles and objects. Create the highlight small and bright for something really shiny, or larger and less bright for duller surfaces. This alone should make a big difference.
Next you need to smooth the edges of the three color values that you have. Do this by noting the main color of the area that you're editing, and the highlight color, and select the color value halfway between these two. Select or mask the main color so that you only paint on this and not the highlight color. Paint with the halfway color between the two color areas, filling on the side of the highlight.
Keep repeating this process until there are no more colors to choose. Do this for every part of your skin and you should have a nicely shaded image.

Now all you need to do is to put on the last minute detail. For instance, with Wolvie, hair on the arms, gloves, and darkening the suit slightly.

If all has gone correctly, you should have a really cool skin.

Shading is something that will improve with practice, so If you are not completely happy with your first attempt, keep at it and you will improve.

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