Short conversion out of range

Studiomdl reports this error:

Generating optimized mesh "c:\steam\steamapps\SourceMods\mod\models/your/model.sw.vtx":
ERROR: short conversion out of range XXXXX
ERROR: Aborted Processing on 'your/model.mdl'

Solution

The problem is that studiomdl.exe is trying to write out a triangle strip with more than 32767 vertices, which is more than Source supports (and also more than any model should ever need). You have run into a engine limitation and you need to reduce the complexity of a portion of the model.

As an example, Valve's highest LOD .SMD for dog is only 1.72 MB and contains 17,433 vertices. Which then divides down to a little less than 6,000 polygons. 10,000 polygons is kind of an informal maximum for the Source engine, hence the maximum vertices being roughly 10,000 x 3 (32767).