Quake2 Tools
- The source code and utilities to make all your quake 2 bells and whistles. Don't leave home without them.
NPherno's Skin Tool, version 0.9 beta 3
- The best skin painter and skin vert layout program around. A little learning curve with the advanced features, but once you see yourself painting directly on your model, you'll detail that old copy of Paint Shop Pro. This program will of course allow you to paint on the model, but it also allows you to pull the faces off a new model and arrange them on the 2d skin for optimization and production. I can't say enough about this program. It's simply the best. You'll find new betas of the final 1.0 version being offered in the messageboards.
[tutorials/NGLV/NGLV.shtml NPherno's GL Viewer]
Tools needed for this program: A Quake 2 model, A video car with good Open GL support, Skins to put on the model, & Time and patience.
Overview: So now you're asking, "What is this thing and why should I use it?" Well that's understandable, plenty of people use Skinview and find this sort of thing useless. Fine, this app is about creating some excellent views of your model with colored lighting and a 4 pass rendering system. Yep, that means four skins per model. This is what id has say will be available to us for Quake3 models. If it doesn't happen for Q3, it is somewhat already part of Half Life, which does offer specularity texture maps for the models. So you can sort of "practice" now plus getting some superb images for your models which is always an excellent thing.
PakRat is a program that displays MDL, MD2, and MD3 models and soon Quake 3 maps. You can drag textures from any paint program and drop them on any mesh (great for skinning). It also sports drag and drop MD3 assembly. It's free, open source, under active development, and Mac only.
- A nice skinning tool similar to NST, but concentrates on just painting the skin. Even does a nice 3d view as well to help you look around it. Works for Quake2 and Unreal.
SkinView Mod 4.3 by The Skinview Team
This is a very nice tool for model authors and skinners who are worried on how their models will look in the game. This tool will load up your model and skin and display it while its cycling through a single animation. It also shows it off in several different lights and settings. It's a invaluable tool. I highly recommend everyone working on a project to take look at your work in this at least once to see what to expect. Here's a link to the offical site so you can read about it while downloading it.
chUmbaLum sOft's Quake2 Model Viewer
- Features/Options: Player model browser, ( browse through player models and double-click to load them ) modified/improved pak file loading, ( double-click to load, or right-click for a popupmenu ), and a skin loading bug for pcx files which had a wrong header has been fixed.
Q2 Modeler v.9b by Philip Martin Updated to v.911b by Jaimi McEntire
A free modeler to make your models with. Many of the models on this site were modeled using this tool. This program is an invaluable tool to the modelers of the community, both the beginner who can use this tool alone to create their models and the advanced who can bring the models from other programs to here for compiling and skin generation [I personally couldn't do reviews or my own models with out it.] Note: Version .9b was thought to be the final version of the tool. The original author has stopped development on it, but another brave soul, Jaimi McEntire, has picked up the torch, and will lead it once again to glory. Jaimi has also updated it to version .911b. Also, here's the Help file for latest version (place in the directory with the rest and it should work fine).
QView by LoneRunner
QView is a small easy and free viewer for anybody who like to view models from games based on any Quake engine. A great list of features, and available source code. Definitely a good one to check out. Word them up, yo.
A new plugin for 3D Studio MAX has arrived in alpha form. It's a MAX to md2 exporter, similar to the QTiP plugin. It's being produced by the throbbing hunks of manly loving on the The Skynet Project: Tactical Combat Simulation page. It was originally going to be used for their Terminator based Q2 mod, which is neither Q2 nor Terminator based, because... well they state the reasons why. Here's a cut, well more a full copy of the all the info they have listed about the plugin on their site. "Max to Md2 is plugin for 3D Studio MAX 2.x. It imports & exports MD2's into 3D Studio MAX mesh or NURBS format."
[tools/testbox/testbox.shtml Test Box] by Wrath
- This is actually a cube model with the entire Quake 2 palette mapped onto each side. Meant for model and skin authors to get a feel for what their colors are going to do in game as Open GL can surprise a few people when they see what happens to their perfect skins.
[tools/Prefabs/Alx_Prefabs-info.shtml Prefabs ]by Big Rocket
- A series of prefab primitive objects that you can use to help start a model. Very useful in conjunction with model editing programs such as Quake 2 Modeler that doesn't offer primitive creation built in.
[tools/Prefabs/Hunter_Prefabs-info.shtml More Prefabs ]by Hunter
- Yet another series of prefab primitive objects. Basically a larger selection of Primative shapes at your disposal, in creating your own PPMs for Quake 2, 3 etc.. (Comes in .md2 and .AQM formats)
This script allows you to bring a skin from a Quake2 model into 3DStudio MAX for texture mapping. The new version will also allow you to export the skin back out. This lets you use some of the more advanced skin editing plugin tools that are available for 3DStudio MAX. The zip file contains an extensive how-to text that should get even the most timid modelers through the procedure. [Although if you're using MAX you can't be too timid
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- Plugin for 3D Studio Max that will export directly to the md2 format. Its a very nice program, but has a few bugs in it still. The team doing it still offer a little support, but for the most part have frozen development of the plugin as it stands now. It comes in 2 flavors for MAX 1.x and 2.x users so make sure you grab what you need. The site also has a full tutorial as well.
qME
A nice basic model creation utility that can be used for Quake 1 and 2. It comes with a variety of tools, but most have found it is a limiting program. It's an excellent place to start though, the demo is free and will let you do models up to 30 frames. The final version was 30 dollars to purchase with no restrictions built into it. You'll need to get it from the 3D Matrix site as they do the selling of it.
Ranger or Q2 Ranger by Mondo Media
- A nice MAX script that allows you to select different active ranges in an single MAX file. An application of this is to only work and view a select number of frames in a long animation, say like the Q2 model format. The zip comes with pre-made ranges for the Q2 frame list. Check Mondo's site for a ton of nice helper tools like this.