MD3
More info
- Creator
- id Software
- Released
- 1999
- Type
- 3D model format
Quake III Arena's model format, which stores animation as a full set of vertex positions per frame and holds body parts together with named tags.
MD3 follows on from Quake's MDL and Quake II's MD2 formats: no skeletal animation, just every keyframe storing all the vertices again, packed into 16-bit fixed point. The engine interpolates between frames. It costs memory but is trivial to draw, and on 1999 hardware that was a fair trade.
The new idea was tags — named points with their own orientation, such as tag_head and tag_weapon. A player model was split into legs, torso and head, each animated independently and joined at the tags, so the legs could run while the torso aimed. Weapons attached to the hand the same way. Doom 3's MD5 moved to proper skeletons in 2004, but MD3 lives on in ioquake3 and the modding archives.