Low Polygon Character Generation using 3DSMAX 1.x or 2.0

This tutorial covers the process of converting your animated mesh to a fully working MD2.
In order for you to follow this tutorial, you will need to download the Quake2 Utils released by iD Software, which are available on he Tools page.

If you have completed the previous two tutorials successfully, you would have ended up with a nice 270-300 face humanoid. In order to generate a MD2, you will need to manualy export each frame of the animation. This is accomplished by moving through the individual frames and exporting each frame to a 3DS file.

Once the above step is accomplished, you will need to import each frame, one by one. You will notice that the face count is over 1400 .. this is because the biped is over 1200 faces, but is not needed because the mesh deformations have been maintaned in each frame, so the biped no longer has control over the mesh, thus can be deleted. Select the mesh, and click on SELECT INVERT. Hit the Delete key. Your face count is back to the 270-300 mark. You have to export the frame again, because you cannot save as a 3DS file. Do this for every frame .. a very time consuming process, but one which has to be made.

Now comes the easy part. Lets presume that you have unziped the Q2 Utils to f:\q2utils
Copy all of your frames to f:\q2utils\bin_nt\frames
Generate a text file, and write the following:

$modelname whatever_name_you_want
$cd frames
$origin 0 0 24
$base base
$skin skin
$frame frame01frame02 frame03 etc etc

Save this file as whatever_file_name.qgr to your /q2utils/bin_nt directory. It is also presumed that when you exported the frames, you named then frame01, frame02, frame03 etc etc. and that you have exported your base frame to base.3ds
Now simply goto the /q2utils/bin_nt directory, and type : qdata -3ds whatever_file_name.qgr
Everything should have gone smoothly. You might have to fiddle with the origin settings ...