Additional notes:

• When watching the video, change the playback quality to “720p HD” if possible.
• There is no audio track in this video.
• Use the New Entity tool for placing the newly created .cmdl model into a map. Watch the Placing a Model tutorial for related information.
• If you want to make adjustments later, both the .cmdl model as well as the material definitions can be edited as shown above also after the model has been placed into a map or world file. The changes will take effect when the program is next restarted.
• In the video, why did we close the model window before editing the material definitions?
  When you save a model file, the Model Editor overwrites the _editor.cmat file as explained at Model Files Explained. In fact, we should never have hand-edited the _editor.cmat file, but do all edits in .cmat (without the _editor part) instead, but we thought it's too difficult to explain that in the video.
  Additionally, the Model Editor had to re-read the new material definitions anyway, so even if our edits were made in the right file, we had to close and reopen the model.

There are two main methods for scaling a model:

• via the Skeleton / the Joint Inspector
• via the Transform dialog

The Joint Inspector can transform individual joints of the model, but only for the bind pose. It is mostly useful for static, non-animated models, but even then only if there is a special requirement that the Transform dialog cannot handle.

The Transform dialog is much easier to use, as it transforms the entire model (the whole skeleton): the transformation is applied to all currently selected animation sequences. If no animation sequence is selected at all, the “bind pose” is transformed.

In some cases, importing animations is very easy: Use the “+” button in the Animations pane as demonstrated in the above video.

However, this works only if the animations are stored in separate files that are compatible with the already loaded mesh. This is specifically the case with md5anims for their related md5mesh file.

We will extend this functionality in the future. Until then and for all other cases, see the next How-To about generically sharing and re-using elements.

Creating variants of a model by sharing or re-using elements of another model is a straightforward idea, but generally not easy to implement: For example, it's easy to share meshes and animations when the skeleton is an exact match, but much harder to do otherwise.

The solution is to manually edit the cmdl model file, which is a Lua script as documented at Model Files Explained.

For example, copying and pasting the definition of an animation from one player model into another (that has a compatible, matching skeleton), tends to work very well.

It is also possible to use Lua's dofile() statement to include models into each other, which we intent to augment in the future to load globals from one model file into a table of another, as to keep the global namespace of the current model clean. All variants of such file inclusion however suffer the problem that it creates a dependency of one file on another. This may be exactly what you want, or maybe not – where in the latter case falling back to copy and paste is probably the better solution.