kensvehla@Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 11:51 pm :
While I have been reading these forums for awhile, I've been banging my head against the wall for far too long with this MD5 Quake IV export issue and finally broke down and made this post.

First off I have a very familiar knowledge with past Id engines, I am very familiar with Quake IV all around except for the MD5 issues. I'm currently a Game Design student at UAT and the Project lead on the Zero Barrier Project. For the life of me I cannot understand why things are not working.

At first with the (console) exportmodels command I received the standard "Cannot find source file" message. I've tried this with Maya 5 and Maya 7. Not only with my character but with a standard box/bone setup to keep things simple. Now Whenever I try to export the mesh it simply hangs there and gives me no indication one way or another what it is doing. It doesn't give me an error, nor does it preceed to look like its executing that command. I'm really not sure why. I've frozen all the transformations before binding, I have an origin bone, deleted history (not neccesarily in that order) and I have a standard texture unwrapped on the model with a simplistic .def and mtr. file.

I've noticed that the mayaexport.dll says 1.4.1 with the beta update for Quake IV. I was wondering if that was an update to enable use for Maya 7 or not. If not I've also tried the Doom3 Maya 7 dll from facinghell.com.

When all of that failed I finally found a Maya exporter for MD5's which looks like it works, but it is giving me a shader error message when trying to execute this MEL script for my model. I aquired the MEL script after a ton of searching through http://www.zbufferstudios.com. Has anyone had anyluck with his MEL script or does anyone have any thoughts as to why the export command is just hanging there? I can post my def file if those of you would like.

On a last note I've almost wondered if the export process is a slight bit different for Quake than it is for Doom3. I know this can't be that difficult, and I know these things usually work out to be something rather simplistic thats right infront of my face, I've just run out of ideas. Any Help would be greatful.


kensvehla@Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 9:50 pm :
well I believe I figured out why the engine wasn't giving me a message one way or another....but I still say this is more of a pain in the arse than it needs to be. I have a feeling the engine and Maya aren't communicating even though I"m using 5.0 ulimited. I've referenced the MAYA_LOCATION and System Path info....

I'm no noob at this kind of stuff, I just for the life of me, cannot figure out why the two aren't communicating. If I cannot get this to work I'm afraid I'm going to disapoint about 12 team members with an unsuccessful completion of this project. Is there anyone out there who has had successfully created a fully functional model using the "exportmodels command?"

BTW- the issue with the engine just hanging there and not doing anything at all was the fact that Raven changed a few things during the Quake 1.41 update, and that I had to go in and enter "set developer 1" to see the warning messages again.


elusive@Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 11:29 pm :
I've exported quite a lot animated meshes to Doom3 with exportModels but not to Quake 4. My first try in those days failed as well but it has worked since then.


kensvehla@Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 4:01 pm :
I actually after a ton of searching and a call to Raven, did confirm that Quake IV can only export the MD5's with Maya 4.5. The Doom3 .dll's do not work with Quake, and that my only alternatives are going to be to find a copy of Maya 4.5, I have a license for 7.0 but I think 4.5 is going to be tough to find, or you can export the models via Doom3 or Prey and take those MD5's and stick them into Maya.

Which kind of sucks, because I gave my buddy (in another state) my copy of Doom3 when I flew back home last Xmas. So I guess I'll have to go out and purchase another copy.

There is a program (Ultimate Unwrap) that will import and export MD5's quite easily, that only costs $50, which may be another alternative to buying Doom again. I think they need to put a Sticky up on the top of the Doom/Quake Modeling sections regarding Quakes exporting with Maya 4.5 only b/c it could have saved me a lot of trouble. LOL.