Quake3World

I created a low poly stack of wood in Blender 2.49b and exported the model with Goofos ASE export v0.6.10 for Blender 2.44. The model looks fine in 3D viewport or when rendered as well as in Radiant and in-game when compiled with -meta only. Once I compile light (the model has the forcemeta flag ticked) I get these nasty black faces:



I've removed doubles and recalculated the normals outside. I don't use any smoothing groups. Any ideas?

In general, it's a good idea to make use of smoothing groups. Lightmaps on a model such as this well probably look worse than if it were vertex lit. Lightmaps are axially projected so they'll look funny on non-planar shapes.

Yah, agreed with what obsidian said, you need to use mesh smoothing (mark your edges) otherwise you'll end up with the problems your having. Also agreee about leaving this type of thing vertex lit... if you really wanted to you could do some vertex painting in Blender and export (although I can't remember if the scripts exports that data with the mesh)

You're right, I use vertex lighting for this model now and it looks totally acceptable. But I still wonder why there were these black faces. I tried smoothing all faces with the bark texture assigned to it, added phong shading and q3map_nonplanar to the shader, but they still look odd. If all faces with an angle similar to the dark ones would be black I'd understand the "lightmaps are projected axially" point. But the lighmap of this model seems to be very specific which faces to light and which not

Do you have the blend file to offer?

Grab it here.

This thread is less racist than I predicted

When you're doing something like this try and avoid really long thin triangles, especially at awkward angles like you have on the sides you originally did. Instead block out your protrusions and then fill in the major gaps. Also I'd recommend either mirroring the sides or at least closing the mesh properly to balance it otherwise you'll be increasing the potential for issues generally. I'd also think about reducing the polycount a little bit, you've got a number of curves on there you could reduce without noticing too much.

The past few days I was just considering trying a hand at modeling myself, but it just sounds like a real pain in the ass

Not really. Modelling isn't "hard" it just needs a few tricks, particularly with older engines like id Tech 3.

Having experience with software like Radiant is enough to have you prepared for "serious" 3D. Took me a day to switch, really. (that's after months of doing complex models using brushwork though)