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marky
Mini-Member

Posts: 61
Registered: 09-03

Hi all!
I'm still working on my TC. Basically, the fist map is ready. But what isn't satisfying at all are some monster sprites. I'm sitting there, staring on my Photoshop and am just stunned by the simplicity and complexity of the original sprites. How could the ID guys make THAT convincing sprites with THAT low resolution? It's a secret I don't understand.
They only had a few pixels and they managed to draw impressive muscles and shadows. Look at the legs of the Arachnotron! A hole universe of shadows and metallic reflexions with only 5 pixels of width.
And, what is even more, they only used 256 colors for it!
Well, I'm not a graphic artist, that may be the main problem. But I imagine, there must be some tricks to make convincing sprites. You can't draw a sprite pixel by pixel. That would take a year for each monster!

Did you ever make completely new sprites? How did you manage to make them convincing and lively?

marky

08-27-04 12:31 #

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Terra-jin
The Sky-Surfer

Posts: 415
Registered: 01-04

id used clay models for the monsters. I think they just took photos of the models, scanned them, and cropped them into DOOM-sized sprites.

08-27-04 12:42 #

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Deathmatcher
Member

Posts: 661
Registered: 06-03

Yes, Carmack wrote a program he called "Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop" with which the artists could easily manipulate scanned images and convert them to the Doom format.

08-27-04 13:06 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

marky said:
You can't draw a sprite pixel by pixel. That would take a year for each monster!

Did you ever make completely new sprites? How did you manage to make them convincing and lively?

Yes You can. Pixel-Artists make that, and Yeah I find really hard to imagine.

An alternative way of doing sprites is to make them large (let's say 128x128-farily large) make them, and then scale them (use bicubic resampling, or bilinears, never pixel scale!).
There's another way-3d softwarez, You get a modelling program and make the model, then photograph it from different angles to make the sprite.
I believe that the combination of both (3d modelling and Paint Program retuning) is the best method.

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08-27-04 13:08 #

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marky
Mini-Member

Posts: 61
Registered: 09-03

hmmmm... ok....

and how do WE do it?

(Btw, I'm not the only one with this complexes, I think. Most monster conversions take the original sprites and change colors. The only really good TC with completely new monsters I've seen so far is osiris.wad.)

08-27-04 13:11 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

do what?
b more specific, thx.
Osiris? What about D64tc? Hacx? WolfenDoom?

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08-27-04 13:11 #

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marky
Mini-Member

Posts: 61
Registered: 09-03

sorry, I posted my last reply while you were writing yours. :-)
I replied to the first two posts, who mentioned clay models and special Doom-3d-modelling-programms. That's nothing that I can do.

Ok, with a 3D-Programm it could work. Have to find one.

08-27-04 13:17 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

http://www.blender3d.org/

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08-27-04 13:20 #

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marky
Mini-Member

Posts: 61
Registered: 09-03

*LOL*
just found it on my own. But your post shows me, that it seems to be good choice. Thanks!

08-27-04 13:24 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

Good luck in learning it. You WILL need it :)

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08-27-04 13:40 #

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Deathmatcher
Member

Posts: 661
Registered: 06-03

Nmn said:

An alternative way of doing sprites is to make them large (let's say 128x128-farily large) make them, and then scale them (use bicubic resampling, or bilinears, never pixel scale!).

Interesting, how do I do this bicubic resampling? Can it be done with Paint Shop Pro? (If yes, how?)

08-27-04 19:08 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

Ofcourse, I use PSP all the time.
Shift+S = scale. Mess with scaling parameters-there are 4-smart size, bilinear, bicubic and pixel (the last one is teh evil IMO).

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08-28-04 08:29 #

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Scuba Steve

Posts: 3740
Registered: 11-02

Yes, it's actually a skill that people develop to try and draw the most ammount of detail in the smallest available space. A good example is SNES RPGs like Breath of Fire and FF6. The characters are all no more than 32 pixels tall and yet are full of life.

The monsters in Doom were 3D models, photographed, and scaled and painted on the computer. You can see touch up work done by hand on most monsters... like the Faces. Detail would be lost, so someone had to go in and redraw the faces with as few pixels as possible, to maintain as much detail as possible.

08-28-04 18:46 #

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marky
Mini-Member

Posts: 61
Registered: 09-03

Yes. it's an art and it's a time-consuming art.

Now I tried to work with this 3D-Programm, but that's only twice complicated. I love Doom and Editing, but it's not worth all the time you need to learn to work with these programs. And when you have cool monster sprites you still have no map and gameplay...
Are there guys out there who are specialized on sprite editing for Doom? Perhaps someone has a cool black fly sprite? That's what I wanted to do.

marky

08-28-04 19:20 #

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deathbringer
Post invalidated by first word being "uhhh"

Posts: 3497
Registered: 04-02

uhhhhhhhh

I've been drawing some pretty good human sprites for doom, well they arent amazing but they have faces, and primitive shading and shadows, they will be mostly in a wad i'm working on called Zombie shock massacre. So far there is a general 'jeans and t-shirt' zombie, which will have a lot of colour variations. A Traffic warden zombie, and one of my mate Lina, which is small. I'll eventally need to make sprites of deformed crawling people, and people that have been integrated into a disgustign biological 'machine', which will be harder to do. Also i'll need to make some cars like the GBD2 ones, except based on real ones, that will probably be hard, but i might make them 'double resolution', then scale them down in-engine. I'm not looking forward to drawing a Vauxhall Cresta, thats a very complicated looking car...

08-30-04 16:30 #

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Scuba Steve

Posts: 3740
Registered: 11-02

deathbringer said:
Also i'll need to make some cars like the GBD2 ones...

...which are the ones from Batman Doom...

08-30-04 23:16 #

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Use3D
Forum Legend

Posts: 4456
Registered: 04-02

I love pixel art, I think sprite artists are a dying breed.

08-31-04 00:59 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

Are You kidding? There's a whole lively community of them:
http://web1.t43.greatnet.de/
Props to Scuba for link :)

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08-31-04 09:55 #

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Graf Zahl
Why don't I have a custom title by now?!

Posts: 7130
Registered: 01-03

Use3D said:
I love pixel art, I think sprite artists are a dying breed.

Ugh...

If that were true I'd be out of work because I wouldn't get any graphics for the cell phone games I'm developing anymore. The world of games doesn't consist solely of high end 3D games and sprite artists are still needed very much. But it is definitely true that may graphics artists can't do it properly.

08-31-04 12:34 #

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deathbringer
Post invalidated by first word being "uhhh"

Posts: 3497
Registered: 04-02

uhhhhhhh

...which are the ones from Batman Doom...

...except the ghostbuster's car...

08-31-04 16:31 #

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marky
Mini-Member

Posts: 61
Registered: 09-03

Well... 3 weeks have passed since I started this thread. I worked on and now I'm quite satisfied with the results. Once you get used to draw your sprites pixel by pixel, you can come to good results.

As an appetizer for the wad I'm working on, and to show you the results, I post two screenshots of new monsters I've made.
Let me know your opinion...

The Phobetor

The Hellbuck

I hope to finish the first two maps of Biovite.wad in a few weeks.

Marky/ Milian

09-18-04 01:35 #

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Erik
Forum Staple

Posts: 2088
Registered: 10-01

Those monsters don't look half bad, good job.

09-18-04 01:56 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

Pixel by pixel in 3 weeks? Great achievement.
The sprites look decent, looking forward to seing the TC.

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09-18-04 07:46 #

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Scuba Steve

Posts: 3740
Registered: 11-02

Nmn said:
Pixel by pixel in 3 weeks?

Well.. the first one clearly isn't, but the second one is a modified imp sprite, so yes, it probably was.

09-18-04 16:38 #

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Nmn
Man of Rone

Posts: 2107
Registered: 08-03

Lol
I meant he learned to follow "the way of the pixel" in 3 weeks, which is pretty good, concerning he gave up some time ago, not that he made the sprites in 3 weeks :P

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09-18-04 16:42 #

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marky
Mini-Member

Posts: 61
Registered: 09-03

Oh, sorry, I didn't want to show off... of course I didn't make these sprites from zero.
The Hellbuck was an imp, but I worked on it the pixel way.
And for the Phobetor I had an image from the net, but only from one view. So I had to draw the other views from this pic and this was really pixel work.

As to the 3D-modeling: I tried to cope with Blender, but that is much too complex if you only do it for Doom sprites.
However, a friend of mine is really interested in 3D modeling and I passed it on to him. Now he works fine with this program and I'm looking forward to the first 3D model I can add into my wad...

09-18-04 17:37 #

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kristus
Megablast!

Posts: 9682
Registered: 07-00

I've been doing alot of sprite work in my years of dooming. Both pixel-artist and 3d artist.

I am quite fed up with pixel art by now.. So I don't do doom sprites anymore.

09-18-04 18:23 #

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