I need some pointers getting my map into Quake

(Mazin) #1

I made an entire map (of a fairly large building) in 3ds max. What I need to do now, is get it into Quake. (Some may think that I should’ve just made it with brushes in the first place, but the map came before Quake.)

Right now, I’ve gotten it into .ase and into GtkRadiant. Okay. There are some issues, but the biggest thing is that I have no idea how to have it automatically make clips. Obviously, right now the player spawns and falls into infinity. I read something about spawnflags, can somebody tell me how exactly to apply autoclip?

Another is that the imported model came as one large object. I can’t figure out how to set what shader it uses, it just shows Shader not found. It would be preferable that I can set shaders for each individual object (doors, floors, etc.). GtkRadiant seems to treat it as one large chunk.

Any help would be appreciated.

(obsidian) #2

Depending on the complexity of the model, I would generally recommend manually clipping your model with brushes marked with the noclip shader. The autoclip feature works, but isn’t meant for high detailed models with lots of polygons. Anyway, clipmodel 1 is the key for autoclipping.

To set separate shaders to different parts of the model, you have to break the model into chunks inside your modeling program and create a new material for each shader. Apply a single material to each chunk. Q3 reads the material name in the model file, not the actual texture path. So the material name should be the same as your shader name… something like, “models/mapobjects/mymodels/modeltexture”. For more details on this, see here:

http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Archives/Archive-000004/HTML/20031022-6-026044.html?

(Mazin) #3

I didn’t try clipmodel 1, but I set spawnflags 2 for the misc_model entity and after a slightly longer compile it came through with all clipping. I also figured out that Q3 wants 24/32-bit TGA files.

About manual clipping… There are some things I would manually clip, but most of it consists of rectangular walls. I tried some, and there wasn’t a noticeable performance hit; I haven’t gotten detailed stats yet. BTW, how do I get past the “cheat protected” block when using stuff r_fastsky 1?

(Twisted0n3) #4

Launch the map with /devmap (rather than /map) from the console.

(obsidian) #5

… and possibly /sv_pure 0 if your files are not in a zip.

spawnflags 1(?) sets clipmodel, IIRC spawnflags 2 sets clipmodel and forcemeta for lightmapped models. Models with a lot of small tessellations actually look much better vertex lit than lightmapped. I expect large rectangular walls to look better lightmapped.

Q3 supports 8-bits/channel only, so for RGB textures, that’s 83=24-bit; RGB with an alpha channel would be 84=32-bit. If you don’t need the alpha, save as 24-bit to reduce file sizes.

(Mazin) #6

Thanks, I think I finally got a grip on things. I think I read somewhere else on this forum that spawnflags 2 was autoclip and spawnflags 4 was lightmap, and if you add them together it becomes spawnflags 6, is this right?

(obsidian) #7

Yes, thanks for looking that up. Didn’t have time to check myself. But those are indeed the right spawnflags.