It's true that Quake (up to Quake3 even) uses vertex animations but that doesn't mean the artists didn't use more powerful 3d modeling software that did support bone animations. Then they just exported the already morphed mesh for the game. I'm pretty sure that's what they did since you could use bone animations way back in 1994 on a video toaster 4000 which was way cheaper than the super expensive workstations Id used.

Regarding interpolation: That was implemented on Quake 2, so on Quake 1 we only had the keyframes (interpolation on quake 1 became possible later via sourceports)

This is a pretty nice video and reveals some nice glimpses into the behind-the-scenes of Quake, however, I'd like to point out some inaccuracies, if that's alright 😅. First off, while it is entirely possible to move around vertices by hand and then let a vertex offset based animation system playback your frames, I'm fairly certain the guys over at ID used skeletal animation to make their animations, and then "Baked" the vertex offsets in their MDL files after exporting. Secondly, the whole vertex jelly thing is often referred to as "Vertex Swimming" in the industry, and is caused entirely due to lack of value precision when storing the vertex offsets. Think of each animation frame as a cube with a 3-dimensional grid inside of it, and each vertex can only be snapped to the grid cells. When exporting the model from the 3d software, the vertices of each frame would snap to the nearest cell in that grid. This is a result of limitation and an optimization at the time, in fact, this still occurs in modern games with skeletal bone transformations, but since we, nowadays, use pretty high precision 32bit floating point values for just about anything, the "Swimming" part of things isn't really noticeable. Interestingly, if you move around too far from the center point of the world in 3d games nowadays, eventually you'll reach a point where the floating point values start to lack precision and you'll once again see the vertex swimming affecting 3d assets, albeit things don't usually start to look like the Quake 1 animations, but the artifacts are similar. I'd also like to mention that in old games, especially on 5th gen consoles from the 90s, like the PS1, vertex positions would be stored using integer values, which is the reason why, in those old games, it kind of looks like everything in the world is shimmering and jiggling around when you move and rotate the camera. Actually even stuff like camera position and rotation would have to be calculated using integers, or, at the very least, fixed point values. Anyway, hopefully some of this was interesting to read and/or useful. Have an awesome day!

You know the first time I launched SFM I didn't know what skeletal controls were so my first attempt at animation used this method. I gave up rather quickly, those ID boys had it rough. You don't pronounce it like "eye-dee", by the way. 😛 But great video.

They were the real MVP

Really interesting. Thank you.

Incredible! Thank you for this great video! Would love if you covered the 2.5D Build Engine by Ken Silverman, he was 18 when he started working on it back in the 90s....crazy!

Neat, that was cool. Didn;t know about all that stuff.

Original quake did not tween between frames, that is the reason why weapon could have polygon flashes just for one frame. New engines that do interpolate between frames actually broke some of the animations.

damn was looking for a song but found this vid and wasn’t disappointed

This video is AI generated.

imo the herky-jerky animations and jelly models were a great part of the aesthetic

i noticed you used Matt's Ramblings' visualization of the BSP algorithm without giving credit, and you erroneously claimed that quake introduced BSP (doom used a 2-dimensional version of the same algorithm). the whole thing lacks any citations, which is important when you're making an informational video. also the writing feels really verbose and repetitive, which, when combined with the AI voice makes me quite suspicious that chatGPT had its hands all over this script... if that's not the case, sorry for making an accusation but it's always something i'm vigilant of these days. i hope you can take this as constructive criticism and be careful in the future to avoid lazy writing techniques that spread misinformation! i'm always into the prospect of more quake content on the site but there's no shortcuts to making a great vid. do your research and write from a place of genuine interest, and your art will blossom :)

AI voice.