This is something I've been tinkering around with. I imported the marines's md3 models and spent some time turning the body/arms and legs models into a single doom3 style mesh, adding some polys in the process. I then made a skeleton, attached the mesh to it and weight painted it. The weight painting is fairly crude, I just weighted some verts 100% to certain bones. It's a bit basic, but that can be improved later.
Here are some pics of the model in Blender. On the left is the model in edit mode (the head is a seperate model). On the right is the model in object mode with the armature visible. I've made the mesh with the elbows bent since they will spend most of the time in the game in roughly that position.
I've set up the models with materials and textures so that proper renders can be done. This could be pretty useful for people doing tremulous art. Here's an example render.
There are loads of advantages to making renders in Blender instead of working from Tremulous screenshots. There are none of the usual problems with transparencies and anti-aliasing. Blender has more lighting options and cool rendering stuff like raytracing. The size of the final image isn't limited by the resolution of your screen, so if you want to do some high resolution artwork you just render off big images to suit.
This could be pretty useful for artists, but there is also the possibility that something like this could be used to implement MD5 models in tremulous. It's already been done with the Xreal engine (which is also derived from the quake3 engine) so it's theoretically possible to implement in Tremulous. Someone else would need to make all the animations for it because I'm not really good at that kind of animation. Worth thinking about.
