I was working my way through the code and noticed the game supports loading MD3 models. I can't believe Doom 3 has been around for 12 years and nobody played around with this. Vertex animation is a bit dated but it still has valid use cases. Of course I was immediately sidetracked. I had to track down an exporter for Blender and try it. Nothing complicated. Just a sphere with a wave modifier on it. I've packaged it up if anyone would like to tinker. It's testmd3.pk4. If you load the model
I updated the animated flag. 250 frames. In the video it's played at 60 FPS.
I thought that disappearing of md3 meshes was because of mirror rendermap, but it also happens without it. Interestingly when you turn on the lantern some of the models are rendered again. Here's the md3.