Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Meaning of reconstruct all objects.
  2. Function of the "flood align triangles" operation.
  3. Size of models explode after editing them in qME
  4. Mapping the skin onto the model like id does.
  5. An imported frame will sometimes have completely messed-up triangles
  6. Using different palettes
  7. Problems using qME with GL-Quake
  8. qME is slow in high color modes

 

Q What does reconstruct all objects mean ?

A What it does is throw away all the objects in your model. It then scans all triangles in the model and puts triangles that are attached to each other into the same object. So every connected set of triangles becomes one single object.

 

Q What is the function of the "flood align triangles" operation ?

A Flood align is used when you import a mesh from a modeling program. Sometimes the triangles in such a mesh are not all facing in the right direction. By using flood align you can align (make it face the same way) all triangles in an object to the triangle you selected.

 

Q I am editing some of the MDLfiles, changing some artwork, then, in QMe, the lightversion i add 2 objects and BWAM, from around 300Kb it jumps to 1.7MB!! what the hell happened here? did i do something wrong, i only added 2 spheres and resized them a bit.

A qME will add a lot of information to the end of an MDL file. To get rid of it use the "Save as Quake model" opetation from the file menu. This will put your model on a big diet. You will loose the qME specific data, like the object hierarchy, joints and skin names though.

 

Q I have been having trouble making a skin for my model. When I first put the model together, the skin is just pieces of the model lined up next to each other. I was wondering how it would be possible to make the skin just like the id ones - just a front and back picture - and to make the skin taller, so more can fit in.

A With a lot of patience and the "recalculate skin vertices" button you can get the result you want. Also using the model properties editor you can set the skin size.

 

Q Sometimes when I import a frame from a file, the frame imports wrong. Triangles are completely messed up.

A [The following answer is from Brad "Technomage" Herman (http://www.voicenet.com/~techno/) who does some amazing modeling with Lightwave and uses qME for importing.]

I know this problem well, I get it all the time, here is what you must do with lightwave. You must have all seperate objects loaded in the same order. In other words, If you are loading the objects up as sperate parts in Lightwave's Modeler, and saveing them, you must always load them in the same order that you did for the base frame, or you get mangeled.

I recently tried to repostion the old player model in Lightwave, when i reloaded him into Qme, he was totaly mangeld. It is very anyoing, I have gotten around it with a great plugin for Lightwave Called Load From Scene at http://www.cadvision.com/ewertb/LoadFromScene.htm Its only $12 U.S. It lets me animate in Lightwave and then load each frame into modeler, then save them, it loads up the objects in the same order each time so they can be morhphed in Lightwave or in my case loaded corectly in Qme. The only problem is it does not read the data from bones, so you have to animate in seperate objects.

Your program [qME] rely's on moving the points in each frame, so when a model is loaded it may look the same but the points are in a different order, and your program [qME] attaches them to the polys set in the base frame. so while all the points look ok; the polys are attached to the wrong points. So your main problem is that people are changing the point order on your program, and its handeling it the best it can. Hope there is a fix for this (maybe take the poly data from each frame?) but I dont know.

 

Q I loaded up my TC models with the new skin and they are all messed up well any way I figured it out it is that we are not using the quake pallette so could you add a pallette import for the TC

A Put the palette.lmp and colormap.lmp you want to use in the same directory as qme.exe and these will be used instead of the original Quake palette. To quickly switch between palettes, create a few copies of the qme.exe in different base directories and put palette and colormap files into these directories. Now starting a specific qme.exe will load it with the correct palette.

 

Q We made some weapon-models with qME v3.0 and have problems using them in GL-Quake because Quake doesn't display them properly. So we want to know which model-editor is the best to use for this ? (We've also tried MeDLe and Advenced ModelED but they're c**p.)

A I asked Bubbah, because I played Malice in GL-Quake and the models looked fine, (fantastic is a better word for it). It seems GL-Quake creates meshes for models when they are loaded for the first time. If you later change the models, these meshes no longer match the new models.

To solve this problem, delete the meshes generated by GL-Quake. You can find these meshes for quake models in the directory "c:\quake\id1\glquake" or when you play a different game, let's say Malice in "c:\quake\malice\glquake\".

Another problems with earlier 0.95 version of GL-Quake seems to be that client side skin animations doesn't work. Now there were no client side skin animations in Quake itself, but some TCs use them. Anyway, the upcoming 3.1 release of qME will have full support for creating client side skin animations. I implemented a few weeks ago.

 

Q qME is very slow on my 166mhz Pentium in high color mode. What can I do about it ?

A The biggest time consumer is the copying of the rendered image to the display. You can get a dramatic speed increase by setting the colordepth to 256 colors. qME has been optimized to run in 256 color mode.