I've pinned many hopes on this tool as well.

Thanks for the dedication Preach. 

So I'm messing around with model skins and I'll be damned if I can figure this out ... I loaded the Quake palette into Photoshop and I feel like I'm losing my mind.

I can't get the right colors to show up inside of Quake. I don't have a custom palette in any of my WAD files ... is this the correct palette?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/palette.jpg

I either get black models or the colors seem shifted off by one row ... it's weird and I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

Is Photoshop not the right tool for painting Quake skins? It has to work, right?

I'm exporting an 8-bit, indexed PCX file... 

http://celephais.net/stuff/palette.gif 

See, it's weird ... if I fill a texture with that light blue color (third row, far right side) it shows up black inside of Quake and in Trenchbroom it's a deep royal blue.

Fuuuuck. 

Maybe there's something helpful in this tutorial? http://ccorner.duke4.net/conversion-to-8-bit-palette/
Check the "image -> mode -> color table" window looks the same as the quake palette? 

Are you just flood filling skins with a single colour to test them? Some engines respond badly to that... They try to replace the bright blue backgrounds on some models with black to get rid of blue seams. However, they do this by flood-filling in black from the pixel in the top left of the skin to all adjacent same coloured pixels. Best to always make sure that pixel is a different colour to the rest of the skin. 

Photoshop has a dodgy PCX support, it seems. When you open Doom or Quake screenshots in it, they're greycale and with aspect ratio correction applied for some reason.

Exporting PCX images incompatible with Quake would make sense in this light. 

Thanks for the info guys, that's all useful!

So if Photoshop is dodgy, what's the recommended program to use for skinning models? What has good, solid PCX support? Or is PCX even the way to go? 

Image-wise, fbxtomdl supports 3 formats: pcx, tga and bmp. It is limited however by which variants of these formats the Python Image Library can load - I know that it doesn't cope well with 8-bit bmp files. You can use 24-bit skins and let the tool convert them, but there are times when, even if you've only used colours from the palette, that conversion can do undesirable things with fullbrights. So I'd recommend trying to get an 8-bit format working; if you want to stick with Photoshop maybe tga will work out well, if you want pcx support I've found GIMP works fine.

On the trail of the default skin bug, it's a bloody weird one. The bug doesn't occur in the python version, it's a side effect of the .exe conversion. The weird thing is that the bug occurs if your command line is "fbxtomdl.exe", but if you omit the ".exe" part then it works as intended. At least we have a workaround now... 

OK, neat. A 24-bit TGA converts accurately so maybe I'll roll with that for now. It will at least get me started... 

the pcx format that is used only has the bare minimum information contained in it. it does not contain the actual colour information of the indices used for each pixel so photoshop takes a guess and loads them as greyscale with 0 being black and 255 being white.
not sure about the aspect ratio, but likely something similar. 

So, QME won't even install on Windows8. Windows just refuses to even try. What can I use to open up an MDL and look at the innards?

I want to figure out how to auto-animate my mesh, for example. Like the walltorch does... 

won't install or won't run?
http://mobile.sheridanc.on.ca/~jonescor/temp/qME.zip 

Won't install. Windows8 says, "This won't work on your PC, LOL". 

did you try the zip file i linked? it's just the qme folder. 

BUT the full install works, thanks necros! 

The LOL is included in your Windows message !? 

I wish it was! More OSes should make fun of you during normal usage. 

Windows is much too serious for that. 

I think the issue is that QMe won't install on 64 bit processor machines, because the program is 32 bit but the installer is 16 bit. This was a common technique in the mid 90s, so you could at least display a message to people in the 16 bit world that the program wasn't compatible. 

Probably my last noob question ... why does the walltorch auto animate? I'm looking at it in QME and I don't see a flag or whatever that would tell Quake to animate it.

The QuakeC doesn't seem to initiate it so ... bluh?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/TorchQuestion.jpg 

*sigh* Frame Group ... NOW I see the little circle on the torch frames. Sorry! 

Hey preach, support for framegroups would be awesome. :P 

Well, other programs can view these shots just fine, so the palette is stored in there somehow. 

Yeah, I had been thinking that was the one bit of support missing. Here's a version with support for them (but literally zero error checking if you do something stupid like overlapping ranges, backwards pairs, invalid syntax, etc)

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/tools/fbxtomdl-0.4.zip

The switch is -g, used like

fbxtomdl -g 1-6,17-25,40-45

Groups have to be constructed from contiguous frame ranges, and animation speed is automatically 0.1. If you want anything fancier you need to install python and check out qmdl. Test it out and if you don't run into bugs I'll make the release proper.