Richard D wrote:

> 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.

Very Nice. 

I had the same idea and wrote a converter for Quake2 mdl files some days 
ago, which worked quite good (and kept uv and normal data).
I'll take a look if there are some pics on my HD...

I'am still playing around with the idea to convert whole Quake3-Levels and 
models for Pov bud didn't find the time.
(And maybe render whole demo files with PovRay - ohhhh)

-- 
Sebastian H.

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