Out of the blue, I was wondering if it was possible to import Unreal
Tournament (for those who never heard it - a 1st person shooter type game)
into Povray and then applying various skins to it.  It would be a crude (and
inexpensive) way to add people into Povray.

Well, I discovered that Shane Caudle (www.planetshane.com) who is the Art
Director of UT, did his skins using Painter 3D and was kind enough to post
some of the models on his site.  I've never used Painter 3D, but the files
are in ASCII and I managed to figure out how they work.  Conveniently, the
format is basically the same as mesh2 in Povray.   So I wrote a program to
convert from Painter 3D to mesh2.  That is what you see in the first
picture.  I also used some image maps from the game (also available on
Shane's site) to make the background.  So it looks okay, but obviously since
all the shadows and highlights are in the image maps, they aren't quite
correct.

So that's cool and all, but it doesn't allow me to alter the character much
since I don't have Painter 3D.  So I then made an attempt to convert the
Painter 3D files to spatch.  Again, I had to figure out the spatch file
format on my own, and I think I figured it out.  The problem is that the
only way I could do it was by losing the normal and uv mapping information,
but I did manage to convert the vertices and triangles.  So from there I
altered the character a little in hamapatch (spatch crashes for some reason)
and exported it to Povray, then rendered it which you will see in the second
image.  So that's how far I got, but I'm not sure if it will be possible to
figure out a way to keep the normal and uv mapping information.  I am
considering writing another conversion program to convert the hamapatch
files back into mesh2 and re-using the normal and uv mapping information
from the original model, but I believe that will result in incorrect normal
information.  I think the uv mapping information might be correct.

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