Nexuiz has a wide range of player models. Some of them are okay, some of them are slightly okay, some of them just are weird. If you have skills in modelling you may feel urged to improve on this situation. This document shall serve as a quick guide into how to create player models for Nexuiz.

Nexuiz supports player models in basically two formats: MD3 and ZYM. So let's have a look what each of those have to offer.

MD3 is the native format of Quake 3 Arena from id Software. It's an oldschool, vertex-animated format. Note that you of course still do skeleton-based animation in your modelling application and that this then gets converted on export. Given how widespread games based upon the Quake 3 engine are many modelling apps have export utilities for MD3.

ZYM is the format all current official Nexuiz player models are stored in. It uses skeleton-based animation (no conversion to vertex animation on export) and happens to be self-controlled, meaning that whole animation-sequences and their timings are stored in the model and the gamecode only selects between those sequences. This is different from e.g. MD3, where each frame of the animations gets a frame number and the game code selects frame after frame with fitting timing to create the impression of a fluid animation.