This document is intended to be a guide or a reference for those who, using Maya to create their characters, want to export them into the Quake III Arena engine. It’s based on our experience at the Virtual World of Art (VWA) where we wanted to create our own avatars for our environments, and reflects as well some particularities due to the specific needs of our project, that might not be the same of the average user willing to create boths for the game. We just use Quake III Arena as an engine for a very different context than what the game itself is about, but I think that it can be a useful reference nevertheless for those Quake III Arena enthusiasts that, using already Maya to model, texture and animate their characters, would like to see them fighting in Quake III Arena.

Although this tutorial is based on Maya, this is not a Maya tutorial. Knowledge of this tool will be given for granted. It is not a step by step modelling, texturing and animation tutorial (there are other tutorials out there covering these areas pretty well already), although I’ll give some tips on some of these areas. What this tutorial is about is the workflow we use at VWA to get our information from Maya into the Quake III Arena engine, with the intention to clarify some concepts and dark areas where almost every user trying to make this process for the first time most probably will hit his head against (like we also did…).

Well, this will do as the mandatory introduction. So let’s cut the crap now and get our hands dirty.
- Process requirements.
For this tutorial, apart from a PC with Maya 4.5 and Quake III Arena installed, the only extra thing we will need is the Maya MD3 exporter plug-in. At the time of writing this tutorial, Maya 5.0 is already available, but for now the Maya MD3 exporter plug-in has only been compiled for the versions 3.0, 4.0 and 4.5, so we should use then Maya 4.5 as the latest in order to fulfil the process.

Download pdf Creating Quake III players for the VWA project