Description of MDL

Hi,

I have been looking at and reading about mdls this afternoon, and I took some notes, which I polished a bit and summarized in a pdf file, which you can find in the attachment. Basically, it only contains common stuff.

There are probably some errors in it, but most stuff should be right. So, if anyone is looking for a description of mdls, take a look.

EDIT: last update 04/01/2005.

Nice document. This will be a good thing to point people to.

Latitude determines the cone angle of the particle emitter.
CollisionShapes, the Anim sections of geosets, and the Minimum and Maximum extents at the beginning deal with what parts of the model can be clicked on to be selected and how far from off the screen a model's origin can be before the model disappears.

Good job. I would really have dreamt of such a file one year ago.

You know what man...this made my day

Thanks for helping us out.

[edit] I'll add any notes here as I read through it:

1) Page 10: A normal is a Vector that indicates the direction that the vertex is "facing". Normals are used for dynamic lighting calculations.

2) Page 12: To clarify abit, a skeleton is comprised of a heirarchy of bones. Per child, the transformations are applied to the cummulative transforms of all bones above it in the heirarchy. So when a torso rotates for example,
all bones attached to the torso will rotate with it according to it's rotation, and then their own local transformation will be applied afterwards.

3) Page 5: Here is my take on the MinimumExtent and MaximumExtent for animation sequences. While a unit is animating, its conceptual bounding box should change as it is animated, but the bounds would have to be updated with every frame of the animation which costs CPU cycles. My guess is that it includes the maximum bounds of the object per animation and uses that for the bounds of the object for the duration of the animation, to ensure the worst case scenario is handled. MinimumExtent and MaximumExtent are the opposite corners of the bounding box. If objects are culled via their bounding boxes, you would want to use the maximum bounds so that the object does not get inadvertantly clipped during part of the animation, if it were near the edge of the screen. Same concept applies for object selection.

Well it is good, but it is to incomplete and have some definitions wrong, you should talk more about materials type and his flags, the materials also uses a tvertexanim id, that refers to his used tvanim. tvertexes anims should be more splecet, you should say that they are animations aplied to the texture in the unwrap area. (not to the tvertices). Helpers are mdlobjects used for animation to help other objects fix position manege and make animation more versatil and easier. attachment points, can also have file path, used for attaching mdl (don't know if WAV or any other extention is supported), lights are between bones & helpers (you forgot that), directional are lights with down direction fron their pivot point and ambient are lights with down direction from their pivot point but amplied like spot lights. Anything else you should try adding more info to particle emitters2 and ribon emitters.

i hope this info help you out finishing your mdl guide.

Why are models without Colission fully selectable?

The bounding box of the model is what is used for selection (indicated by the MinimumExtent and MaximumExtent in the model, or the Min/Max extent of the current animation sequence). The collision bounds are used for in game collision with other objects.

thats because, the MaximumExtent and minimunExtent is for selection, but colotion shapes, make the object to don't be transpasible by other models in game so, they are fully necessary, if you look at blizzard models, all of them have colition shapes.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll update it one of the next days.

Can I get your permission, or would you take the time to post this under my tutorial sub-forum at my site (see link in my signature). I've written a fair few tutorials and I'd love to have people look at another source.