Exporting as md3's.....and/or: what are tags?
 

Hullo-

I was wondering if anyone has any ideas on exporting Maya 6.0 (or Maya 5.0, if necessary) models and animations as MD3 files. (I don't know a ton about md3 file format, but, as an example, that's what was used for quake3).

I've downloaded the md3 plugin fromquake rally and it seems to load alright, but I just can't get it to work.
The best result i've had so far is a one-liner text file that essentially says "frames: 10 and model: 0", or it just tells me it can't find the operation.
I tried downloading the source code as well, but I don't know enough (or anything, I suppose) about programming to do anything productive.

I know I should be triangulating the model and baking the vertices, which I have done.
I also keep finding references to "tags" used to label the three portions of the model (head, upper, & legs) but I don't know how or what they are in Maya- I can't seem to find the term "tags" in help and I'm not sure what the equivalent would be. This 3d max tutorial kind of explains their purpose, but only describes how to make them in 3d max, of course.

Alright, well, that was kind of a long description, but hey. Thanks just for reading it (if you read it and didn't just skip to the bottom of the message hoping to find a concise question) and if you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it.
Ciao ciao.
-katie

Well... I figured it all out at some point and all I want to say that it's a crappy, buggy and nerv burning route to go.. The exporter is buggy and has really nasty pitfalls that you can and most likely will fall into (often). When I got my working Q3 player model done I decided that I will not never ever do it again :) To be honest I have already forgotten most of the stuff I learned doing this.

Anyhoo, the tags are just polygon triangles, whose normals should be pointing to a direction that makes sense. The pitfall in the tag tris is that the length of sides of tris cannot be equal or the exporter will crash... yes.... sounds odd but it is true... i ran into this just by experimenting and finally debugging the source code of the exporter... <- not fun :/

Anyhoo, you can find my Q3 player model in the link in my sig...

Well, I was losing hope- glad to hear it's at least possible, if only barely. I'll have to keep messing around with it, I guess. *sigh* Why couldn't it just be easy? No pain, no gain, I guess.
I might keep bugging you (no pun intended...) with questions as they arise, if that's alright.

The model looks great, btw! I love the skins and the death animations.
-katie

I found that clearing my history before exporting works ok for me.... at times:)

thanks, probably a good idea! :)

related question: I've heard it's easier to export from 3ds max...is this true? If i could get find someone with a copy that i could use, would it be easier to bring the model to 3ds, do the animation there, and then export?
granted, i don't know how to use 3ds...

-katie

...*breathes deeply and tries counting to ten to calm down*....

1....
2....
3....
4....
5....




AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGhhhhhhhhhhh!
(in Gollum voice...)
Nasty, nasty little exporter.
We hates it!