Max 2010 to Quake 3 Arena: Character Exporting

[pencilwhipped]

It appears that I've encountered a very interesting challenge with exporting a character to quake 3 arena. I followed this particular tutorial to the letter http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewto ... 53&t=15734 , and I got this error message in testing:

"Failed to load models/players/piratepad/lower.md3"

-I built a completely new animation set in max 2010 for a custom character that has already been successfully used in the q3arena engine.

-applied the tags to the appropriate places (based on three other tutorials).

-Completely baked the head, torso and leg animations to vertex.

-exported to *.ase (again, followed Doom3World's tutorial to the letter here).

-successfully came out the other end of q3data with three new md3 pieces

-minded my p's and q's with the skin files, animation.cfg, botfiles and everything else to the best of my knowledge.

-ran the new md3's through npherno, rebuilt the normals and even edited the paths to the texture maps

-I have lod's set up.

-I have a properly structured directory system in my pk3.

I double checked my paths and naming conventions and repacked my pk3. When I tested again I got:

R_LoadMD3:models/players/piratepad/lower.md3 has wrong version (538976271 should be 15)

I have to admit, I'm at a loss here, and I'm starting to run out of tutorials that apply to my specific version of Max 2010, where the only plugin, pop n fresh, came with little to no documentation. What am I hitting here? It sounds to me that the md3 files are at issue. What does it sound like to you?

[obsidian]

Have you tried using Q3data.exe to do the file conversion? It's a little harder to get working, but once you do, it's guaranteed to give you proper results seeing as how id Software wrote it specifically for this purpose.

Back when I did this kind of thing, PnF always gave me problems, it IS a bit buggy.

[pencilwhipped]

Here’s the options I’m seeing for myself:
-learn more about npherno’s md3 compiler and make absolute sure that you know what it is you are doing and that are using all the ways you can use the software.
-find out more about the export md3 option you’ve successfully installed within max 2010, and how to use it for the purposes of bringing a character into quake 3 arena.
-locate any and all documentation on pop ‘n’fresh.
-locate someone who can troubleshoot q3 data

[pencilwhipped]

Hi Obsidian, thank you for your reply. Didn't see you there before I posted.

The answer is yes. I followed the above links q3data tutorial to the letter and came out the other side with three new model pieces. I completed the tutorial and got the messages. I tried to fix the md3's with npherno and got the new error message.

[pencilwhipped]

It occurred to me that if I'm following this tutorial for q3 data to the letter, then the problem might be sourced at the original max file itself. I could use a second pair of eyes on this file. I have a feeling it would be fairly easy fix. This character has already appeared in a standalone title, and I made zero structural alterations to this character whasoever. All I did was give it a fresh rig and animate it. That's it. As far as I know, the tags are fine. I looked at three different tutorials to put them on.

[obsidian]

I don't really do any player modeling so I'm not sure how much use I could be. Have you tried asking on Doom3World and maybe contacting the person who wrote the tutorial?

[pencilwhipped]

The people who wrote the tutorial are now gone. If other people have successfully put characters into this game, I know I can too. I am still making a hard effort to solve my own issue, but if one of you out there is an experienced q3 arena character guy, speak up and maybe we can work out an arrangement that benefits both of us.

[obsidian]

Maybe also try asking at Polycount:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/

If you find results, please remember to post the solution here, I'm sure there are other people curious about this as well.

[pencilwhipped]

Here's an update:

I am able to take the md3 files in question and view them perfectly in npherno glviewer for md3's. I had to play around with the tag linking to get it all to fit properly, but I checked this against our other characters that haven't had thair animations modified yet and are otherwise functioning in-game characters, and they came into npherno with the same issue of needing to be reassembled in npherno's compiler to be viewed properly.

So both the current in-game assets, and my modified animation asset can be viewed just fine in Npherno model viewer. Is there a way to fix the md3's to work in quake3?

[pencilwhipped]

I compiled a work order on Elance to hire out my answer. What's $50-100 to me if I solve this for everybody?

[pencilwhipped]

Update:

I downloaded a program called md3fix. It runs from dos prompt. I saw my model in game for the first time, as a result of using it. The modelhows, but several issues have popped up:

1. player head is upside down and backwards in HUD.

2. The animations are COMPLETELY garbled up into a random blur of a character, with the exception of the firing animation, which looks AWESOME if it werent for the fact that...

3. The player appears to be three feet above the ground!

[pencilwhipped]

I really do hope this helps some of you guys, and I'm really sorry about not posting this sooner.

Pop'n'Fresh Md3 exporter does the trick in getting the character out of Max 2010 x64 in windows 7. However, to put the character back into the game, bring whatever you export out of Max into Npherno's Md3 compiler and run it through a very basic process, outlined in this document below:

http://merlin.zsnes.com/tutorials/export/index.html

Quake 3 Md3 user documentation on the web is notorious for turning up a bunch of dead links. Should that happen to you, try out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Simply copy and paste your dead link code into the the form entry and run a search. I've had to do this more than a few times over the course of the learning curve on this end.

[spookmineer]

I'm sorry but this is a weird thread...
OP vs obs: 9 - 3.