ikanatto weblog: unofficial MDM&MDX specification

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April 15, 2005

■　unofficial MDM&MDX specification

Here is the data structure of mdm and mdx which I am using in the tool. but there is no guarantee to ensure this document saying truth. So use these info at your own risk.

Player model in ET

Each character used in ET is assigned in characters of pak0.pk3. There are some files to define a character, they refer what class it is, what mesh it uses, what animation group it uses, what mesh it uses when it is undressed, what model its head is.

The mdm is a mesh data file for player models. mdm includes the surfaces and tags. The surface is a geometric data of model or polygon data. Skinning the surfaces with textures, the model appears in ET. The tag is a position info to attach another model to this model. The tag has its position and degree at each frame.

The mdx is a animation data file which contains bone structure and frames. The bone is a skeltal model data. Each bone has its length and its parent bone. The frame is a 3D-position data of the bones. one of the mdx frames have slightly different bone position compared with the previous frame. Thus a series of those frame will make an animation of a action. Ordinarily the mdx has several(or massive) number of animations in it.

A combination of mdm and mdx makes the polygons live, act, be a player.

This system is extremely good for sharing the animations which are used by the similar models. For example, ET only has one mdx( precisely there are more but they are a little ) to be used by the player models, 5 classes of allies and axis team. If we need to create the animation data for each model as like RtCW, The file size will be more bigger and memory requirements will be higher.

However the combination of mdm and mdx is valid when they have the same bone structure. This means that we must create new mdx if we make a non-humanlike model or a small or tall person. I myself think that separating the model data into a set of meshes, tags and bone structure and frames is better if we want to make a small or large human model.

MDM Data Structure

[MDM]
  |
  |--[MDM HEADER]
  |
  |--[Surface]
  |     |
  |     |--[Header]
  |     |--[Vertex]
  |     |--[Triangle]
  |     |--[Collapsemap]
  |     |--[Bone Reference]
  |     :
  |
  |--[Tag]
  |    :
  |
  |--[EOF]


[MDX]
  |
  |--[MDX HEADER]
  |
  |--[Frame]
  |     |
  |     |--[Frame State]
  |     |--[Compressed Bone Frame]
  |     :
  |
  |--[Bone]
  |    :
  |
  |--[EOF]

Detail Data Structure

Here is a data specifications of mdm and mdx. Repeatly I say, they are not guaranteed to be right.

MDM HEADER

MDM HEADER is the header section of mdm. There are information of version, location, Level of Detail, number and offset of the surfaces and tags and so on.

MDM HEADER
Name	Type and Size	Description
MDM Identification	char * 4	Magic Number. It should be 'MDMW'.
MDM Version	int32 * 1	mdm version. It should be 3.
MDM Name	char * 64	Name and virtual path to this mdm.
LoD Bias	float * 1	These are coeffcients of Level of Detail.
LoD Scale	float * 1	These are coeffcients of Level of Detail.
Number of Surfaces	int32 * 1	Number of surfaces this mdm has.
Offset to Surfaces	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of the surfaces from this header. Header size is fixed then this value also fixed.
Number of Tags	int32 * 1	Number of tags this mdm has.
Offset to Tags	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of the tags from this header.
Offset to EoF	int32 * 1	Offset to EoF of this mdm. Otherwords this mdm file size.

Surface

Surface is a mesh data which will be seen as a part of the player model in ET. Generally a mdm has several surfaces. They are almost separated upper and lower parts, also hands and torso. Example:

MDM SURFACE HEADER
Name	Type and Size	Description
Surface Identification	int32 * 1	ID or version of surface. It should be 0x00000009.
Surface Name	char * 64	Name of this surface. Generally it refers what part it is. Such as u_body, l_legs.
Shader Name	char * 64	Name and virtual path of the shader to apply this surface. The ET mdm has nothing here. The skin file defines what shader this surface uses.
Shader Index	int32 * 1	?? I dont know what this means. However this is always 0.
LoD Minimum	int32 * 1	This determines the maximum LoD effect on this surface.
Offset to MDM Header	int32 * 1	Offset to MDM Header from this surface address. always negative value.
Number of Vertices	int32 * 1	Number of vertices this surface has.
Offset to Vertices	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of the vertices data from the head of surface data.
Number of Triangles	int32 * 1	Number of triagles(polygons) which consist of this surface.
Offset to Triangles	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of the triangles data from the head of surface.
Offset to Collapsemap	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of the collapsemap. The collapsemap is the list of triangle indices in order to apply LoD. This list indicates the triangle(or vertex?) will be omitted in that order.
Number of Reference Bones	int32 * 1	Number of the bones which are used when this surface will be rendered with calculating its vertices.
Offset to Reference Bones	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of the reference bone list.
Offset to Next Surface	int32 * 1	Offset to the next surface or this surface data size.
Name	Type and Size	Description

MDM SURAFCE VERTEX is a vertex data of this surface.

MDM SURFACE VERTEX
Name	Type and Size	Description
Vertex Normalized Vector	float * 3	Normalized vector of this vertex. Maybe used for lightening effect.
Texture Coordinates	float * 2	UV coordinates of the texture image. 3 vertices will cut an triangle image which their potisions are refered by this uv coords from the texture. This value is standardized so ranges from 0 to 1.
Number of Bone Weights	int32 * 1	Number of the bone weights which will affect this vertex.

Weight is a element to determine where the vertex is. The vetex potision is calculated by summation of the multiple of the weight and its position of each bone.

MDM SURFACE WEIGHT
Name	Type and Size	Description
Bone Index	int32 * 1	Index number of the bone which affect the vertex.
Weight	float * 1	A coefficient how much this bone affects the vertex position. A summation of this value must be 1.
Position Vector	float * 3	The position vector of vertex when this bone is treated as an origin.

Triangle is combinations of 3 vertex indices to buld a polygon.

MDM SURFACE TRIANGLE
Name	Type and Size	Description
Vertex Indices	int32 * 3	3 vertex indices to make a polygon.

Collapsemap data is not specified yet. Reference Bone data is the continuous number of the bone index. They are int32 and their amount is same as the number of Number of Reference Bones in Surface Header.

Tag

Tag is popular for Quake3-Engine-Based game modders. Tag is used to attach another model to this model. mds which has been used in RtCW has different tag data type. mds treat the tags as bones so the position of tag will be changed at each frame.

MDM TAG
Name	Type and Size	Description
Tag Name	char * 64	Name of this tag.
Rotation Matrix	float * 9	A 3*3 rotation matrix to calculate another model's pose or angles.
Attach Bone Index	int32 * 1	Index of the bone which this tag is attached to.
Position Vector	float * 3	The position vector of tag when attached bone is treated as an origin.
Number of Reference Bones	int32 * 1	The number of bones to calculate the tag's parent bone position. Ther are from a root bone to the previous bone of the attached to.
Offset to Reference Bones	int32 * 1	The relative offset to the Reference Bones data from the head of this tag data.
Offset to Next Tag	int32 * 1	Offset to the next tag data or this tag data size.
Reference Bone List	int32 * Number of Reference Bones	Index list of the Reference Bones.

MDX HEADER

MDX Header refers the version, numbers and offset of the frame and bone structure of this mdx.

MDX HEADER
Name	Type and Size	Description
MDX Identification	char * 4	ID of mdx, it should be 'MDXW'.
MDX Version	int32 * 1	MDX version, should be 2 for now.
MDX Name	char * 4	Name and virtual path of this mdx.
Number of Frames	int32 * 1	Number of the frames this mdx has.
Number of Bones	int32 * 1	Number of the bones this mdx has.
Offset to Frames	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of frames from the header.
Offset to Bones	int32 * 1	Offset to the address of bones from the header.
Torso Parent Bone Index	int32 * 1	Bone Index to be a torso parent.
Offset to EoF	int32 * 1	Offset to EoF of mdx otherwords size of this mdx.

MDX FRAME

Frame is a state of the skeltal model at a moment. It can be the scene of firing Panzer, or dying by the head shot, or Nazi salutling. There are 2 sections in Frame, Frame State and Compressed Bone Frame. Frame State refers the bounding box of this model at this frame and a base position which will be used as the parent bone by the root bone. Compressed Bone Frame is the bone position data at this frame. "Compressed" means that each data is not 32bit, but 16bit.

MDX FRAME STATE
Name	Type and Size	Description
Bounding Box Vector 1	float * 3	The relation of 1 and 2 is diagonal. The box area created by using vector 1 and 2 to the box diagonal positions is called Bounding Box. The Bounding Box is used for checking collision or hitting box or trigger entity and so on.
Bounding Box Vector 2	float * 3
Local Origin	float *3	The origin position which is used at this frame.
Bounding Sphere Radius	float * 1	Another Bounding area, sphere type. Used for the explosion damage etc.
Parent of Root Bone	Tfloat * 3	The position used by calculatin of the root bone position.

The Compressed Bone Frame follows after Frame State. It will repeat same times as the number of bones.

MDX COMPRESSED BONE FRAME
Name	Type and Size	Description
Angle(Pitch)	int16 * 1	These are used to calculate the rotation matrix of this bone.
Angle(Yaw)	int16 * 1
Angle(Roll)	Type and Size
(unused?)	int16 * 1	Maybe this is inserted to make an unit of Compressed Bone Frame has 32bit order.
Offset Angle(Pitch)	int16 * 1	This is used to calculate where is this tag.
Offset Angle(Yaw)	int16 * 1	This is used to calculate where is this tag.

To know the bone position, you have to summation the vectors which are calcurated by using ( Parent Distance, 0 , 0 ) as a start vector, rotating it with Offset Angles.

To convert angles to radian, just do this: Radian = 2 * 3.14 * Angle / 65536.0

MDX BONE

Bone Structure is like a puppet. A puppet has joints and fixed-length bones. Bones in ET is so. The meshed are attached around the bones. If a bone moves, mesh moves. If a bone is rotated, mesh is rotated as well.

MDX BONE
Name	Type and Size	Description
Bone Name	char * 64	Name of this boen.
Index of Parent Bone	int32 * 1	Index of the parent bone to calculate this bone position.
Torso Weight	float * 1	Coeeficient how much this bone tends to be like torso.
Parent Distance	float * 1	Distance from this bone's parent.
Flag(?)	int32 * 1	If this bone is a tag, this value is 1 or not, 0. but in ET there is no longer tags as bones, this is always 0.

References and Thanks

http://mojo.gmaxsupport.com/Articles/MDSFileFormat.html

Chris Cookson speced the mds, and this is extremely helpful for ET modder as well. Thanks that great documents.

投稿者 ikanatto : April 15, 2005 07:11 PM

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■　カテゴリー

General

Urban Terror

Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory

April 15, 2005

■　unofficial MDM&MDX specification

Player model in ET

MDM Data Structure

Detail Data Structure

References and Thanks

■　コメント

■ カテゴリー

General

Urban Terror

Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory

April 15, 2005

■ unofficial MDM&MDX specification

Player model in ET

MDM Data Structure

Detail Data Structure

References and Thanks

■ コメント

■　カテゴリー

■　unofficial MDM&MDX specification

■　コメント