Quake 3 Skinning FAQ
Answering your frequently asked questions about
skinning
Contents
What can you tell me about Quake III Arena?
How do I make a skin for id's Q3A?
What about the palette?
How can I view how a Q3A skin looks over the model?
What are those "shader files" things?
How can I use those?
Additional editing by Krow and Ceptos.
What can you tell me about Quake
III Arena?
All the skinners were waiting all their hard, bitter lives
for a game like this! At the time of writing, Quake 3 is the
nicest game to skin, for several reasons, but mainly because
it has a 24 bit colour palette (that's photorealistic kids!)
so it doesn't really have a palette at all.Quake3 supports more
than one image per model and there are several models bundled
with the game, all of which are incredibly well mapped. It has
a really outstanding feature called "shaders" that allows you
to add groovy animated special effects to your skins."
How do I make a skin for id's Q3A?
It's very simple. Grab some skin meshes (the wireframes) and
start painting. The skinmeshes are available in the files section.
Once finished, save the images as either JPG or TGA. TGA is
better for quality, and it supports alpha channels - these allow
you to program special fx using the aforementioned shaders.
Name the files descriptively for your own convenience - if
you want the skin to be called "sandman", name the head skin
part as "h_sandman.tga", for the body use "sandman.tga" and
so on. You also have to make an icon too, it's an image that
is used for the scoreboard and other things. Do a screen grab
of your model from a model viewer, crop the head from that,
then resize to a 64 x 64 image.
When all these images are ready, you have to make the .skin
files. There are always 3 - upper_skinname.skin, lower_skinname.skin
and head_skinname.skin. So, our sandman skin would have upper_sandman.skin,
lower_sandman.skin and head_sandman.skin. These are simple text
files which tell Quake 3 how to assign your images to the model.
The best way to create these is to copy an existing one for
the model you are skinning, then modify it. You can type it
in a using a simple text editor like Notepad or BBedit.
Now create from the root drive of your machine a folder called
"players", inside of it, another named after the model you are
skinning for (e.g. sarge, ranger, mynx, ect).
Copy all the .skin files and image files to this folder, then
use Winzip to make a zip file with path names included. Call
this file skin-MODEL-skinname.pk3, where MODEL is the
model you created the skin for, and skinname is the name of
your skin.
If
you put this pk3 file in your /baseq3 folder of q3a, you'll
be able to select your skin in the player skin selection menu.
This is also the file you have to distribute to share your skin
with the world.
What about the palette?
You don't have to worry about the palette in Q3A. All images
are 24 bit by default, 32 bit if you are using TGAs with alpha
channels.
How can I view how a Q3A skin looks
over the model?
There are a couple of Q3A model viewers out there, check the
files page for links
and downloads.
What are those "shader files" things?
The shader files are files that allow you to make really cool
effects with your skin, like the famous "pulsating eye" effect,
or the awesome electric effect you see in the "Angel" skin.
Basically, they can replace parts of the skin by other images,
moving them in some way, making them hollow among a verylong
list of things.
How can I use these "shader files"
?
The only problem with these files are that are a bit difficult
to use, you have to "program" them. I'll explain how you can
make the "pulsating eyes" effect for you to mess around with.
First, you need 2 files, the default head skin, and another
of the same size in black, with the effect in the right place.
In this example I've used my "SOLDIER45G9" skin:
These two images together should look something like this:
To
make the effect work you will need to learn how to define alpha
channels and masks. Check out the tutorials section for a detailed
guide to doing this.
