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August 22, 2001
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Well, I'm not $200 million richer ...
Apparently I lost some Unreal instructions somewhere along the way here - probably when I took off some of the old news. I've added a link to that old news, and I've also started a Model Primer page for the Unreal plugin. Just something to get you started - I realized there really wasn't even any accidental documentation up here for that anymore. Hays' tutorials do a great job for the first-time MD3 modeler, but there is currently nothing like that for Unreal.
Just passed 2500 visits for the first month ...
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August 19, 2001
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The big news this time is the MD3 tutorials that Hays Clark put up. These are great! I'll keep a permanent link off the MD3 exporter page.
I've had some contact from people using the A5 Game Studio engine from Conectic. It seems that that engine uses MD2 as a potential import into their model editor, and - although the files my plugins were creating worked in Quake2 and other viewing utilities - they would get all wigged out when loaded into their editor. Long story short, I had some internals of the file ordered in a non-standard fashion, and I tweaked it, and now things seem to work. Also, if you're getting weird, jumbled polygons, be sure to pick up the latest version of the hub plugin - it seems to help, although I'm at a loss as to why.
Started filling out the site a bit - added my work experience. Now to add some gfx.
Also, LightWave 7.0 has been released by NewTek and I don't have the teensiest clue as to whether it's going to break all my plugins or not. I havn't ordered a copy for myself yet - I don't really think I'm going to - so someone out there will have to let me know what the status is.
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August 16, 2001
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Small update this time. First I want to hype Route 11 Chips. Wow - the 'Mama Zuma's revenge' flavor is wikked. Used to be called 'Death Rain' ...
Ok, there is a BUGFIX in the MD3 exporter - the bounding boxes were still wrong. Well, not so much the bounding boxes as their ranges. You'd see the bug manifest as models disappearing when they reached the edge of your view.
Furthermore, I added ActorX-style mesh names to the Unreal plugins. The importer creates meshes with names by those rules on the way in, and on the way out, surface bits are set, and the meshes are ordered based on numbers and tokens in the name of the UV maps. A better explanation of what this all means is described on the Unreal plugin page.
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August 7, 2001
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Yes, long time, no noise. I've got a couple things to make up for it though.
Everyone sick of Code Red yet? I live off Mtn. Dew, but that new stuff just isn't for me. Voodoo FireFly Buzz on the other hand ... re: the worm, intitially it was fun watching it hit Apache and just die in the access_log, but now it's getting a bit old.
-- Updates --
WARNING: If you update the Export plugins, you MUST pick up the new hub too. Currently you can tell if you have the right hub or not by checking out the n.Nnn digit in the plugin version. That's probably going to change, because its rather hackish.
The export plugins have a newer interface that looks a little slicker, and is also closer to the Unreal Tournament ActorX exporter wrt the frame lists. Now you can use a pattern to define which frames get pulled into the target models. Something like 0-4,7,7,7-0 would grab frames 0,1,2,3,4,7,7,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 and 0. This is useful to rendering out stalls ore reverse animations without comprimising your Scene by shifting frames around. Thanks to the Unreal people for suggesting it.
It is now possible to animate an existing MD2/MD3 in LightWave right from the source files themselves. This is probably best for resurrecting lost models, or rendering out spiffy animations of your PPM. The import plugins now allow you to create an EndoMorph for each frame, and I also have plugins (under Extra Plugins that help you keyframe those (by animation name) and also lock objects together using the tag polys that are created. The whole procedure is a bit ... flakey, so eventually I need a tutorial on that. For now, just try it out and have a little fun with it.
I'm working on setting up a Bleeding Edge area on the site so you can come by and see what's new and dngerous w/o having to wait for me to pretty everything up. I'm getting a little loose with the releases anyways. So - as always - be careful. I found a bit of a bug tonight where - I think - I can lose models in the scenes, but I have to do some more investigation.
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July 24, 2001
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Got an update of substance this morning. I found out that Quake2's MD2 is a bit more active than I had expected. Furthermore, the exporter that did exist hadn't been rebuilt for 6.x Lightwave to take advantage of the UV utilities. So I took a stab at an exporter for that. The results are available here as well as bundled in the 'everything' file as usual. I seriously thought this was almost a dead . Guess I was wrong. Everyone that finds this useful should thank Scott at Steel Ronin, for enlightening me!
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July 23, 2001
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I hate seeing Wakefield get hammered like that. There's something gratifying in watching a guy strike out major league hitters with knuckleballs.
I've gotten a few questions along the lines of "I can use LightWave, but what needs to go in a MD3?". I'll try to get up a little MD3 background tutorial. In the meantime, you can always check out the forums at and for help. There is a lot of good info there.
A couple more bugs were reported this weekend, and one was of sufficient 'showstoppiness' so I decided to bundle up a couple releases. The md3 and unreal plugins have been updated. Or you can always just grab everything
That's pretty much it for now. I'm still fiddling with the version numbers - I'd like it to be obvious when a new hub is needed and when it isn't. I'll probably save major revision numbers for that.
Remember to check back often - I'm sure we're going to be seeing a number of these little point releases.
Fixes
There was an issue with the ObjectImport plugins where improper return codes would pollute all the other ObjectImport plugins, making loading anything that wasn't a .lwo a bit obnoxious.
The MD3 exporter was munging Bounding Box values. This became obvious when a PPM was used inside Quake3 - the head model would not be visible in the viewport.
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July 19, 2001
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Glad to see so many people feel these might be useful. Now let's see some killer PPM work!
'Repeat First Down'
Well, that didn't take long. Hays Clark (Omita Design) brought an issue to my attention earlier today - if you are funneling 2 objects into a single target with any of the Export plugins, and those 2 source object happen to contain a common UV, the points will tromp all over eath other. The intention was that the 2 would sort of append to one another, but that's not what's happening. Since it's not doing what I'd intended it to, that's a BUG ... but if your source objects don't share UV map names, it's not an issue, and you'll never know it's there.
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July 18, 2001
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Now open for public consumption!
Welcome to the public unveiling of (what I hope will be) the first in a suite of game export tools for Lightwave3D users. Despite LightWave rocking as a modeling tool, people seem to have to work through 3dstudio eventually to get anything into a game.
I'm hoping for feedback on the site (content, not layout), the tools, anything. I've had some extremely helpful people testing these (offhand thanks to Robert Ramsden of TeamTerminator, Delucubus, Eammon Jones, John Karner, tpe and BlazeQ!) but I'm sure they are not bug-free. Eventually I'll put up some sort of tutorial - the pages describe what's on the panels, but there isn't a good walkthrough. The 'big huge' zip file has some sample scenes in it.
That said - Please be careful. If you're adding these to an existing scene, make a copy of it. Make backups as you go along.
Notes
All exporting is done from Layout. I'm going to add some sort of single frame export from modeler.
Importing into Layout with either plugin will crash Layout when you go to save (I'm missing something somewhere) so if you are importing models, import into Modeler and save out to a .lwo before working with it.
All animations must be done in the same scene file (nothing 'appends' yet). Use buffer frames to reset your character to a neutral pose, and define FrameLoops around them.
Questions ...
Layout? Good, bad, ick? This is my first try at this stuff, so be gentle. Frames or no Frames? Any constructive, not-from-a-flaming-zealot opinions? I'm preprocessing into single pages for now.
The Unreal Skeletal export plugin is very 'fresh' compared to the Quake3 one. Lots of stuff isn't implemented yet. I'm very interested in hearing what people think about this.
What's next? Not sure. I'd like to get the Unreal one squared away before starting something new. MD4 was supposed to be done, but I never got the working in Quake ...
Domain ... I need a good name. Any suggestions?
Good luck, have fun and please drop me a line with comments. ...And eventually I'll get some images up.
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