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Maes

Plasticine sprites [WIP] -> NOW WITH DEMO .WAD!

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Yesterday, I noticed a box of plasticine at a local supermarket. Nice, big, colored chunks, that reminded me of the palette of a certain game...so I made an impulse purchase, and tried to model a simplified cacodemon:



and this is how it would look with Doom's resolution and palette:



I haven't modeled anything in clay or plasticine for years, and this is just a rough approximation of a cacodemon (it has however a bumped surface and various orifices ;-) but I think that this sort of modeling has some potential. Next time I will try with humanoid figures, although I'll probably need some more refined techniques like wire/toothpick skeletons and perhaps accessories.

The actual size of the model is slightly less than a ping pong ball.

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I believe one of the enemies in Hacx was modeled this way. TV is also working on a full blown TC that uses either clay or plasticine models for the enemy sprites and it looks pretty good.

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If there's enough interest (and as soon as I can find my camera's tripod and set up a "photo studio" to use for rotations and chroma-keyed badkground), I will make a small sprite PWAD out of it to see how it'd work out.

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I love clay games. Neverhood and Skullmonkeys were awesome, therefore this may end up being awesome by extension. I look forward to it.

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Hey I literally threw this together in 5 minutes (well, at least after I figured out the best way to carve the "teeth") without any reference but memory. For the sprite experiment I'll use a pic of the actual sprite and add more detail.

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Hey, this is a pretty badass idea man. But that reminds me...my daughter has a huge box of Play-Doh containers (one of those party packs) that has never really been opened...maybe I could use that to model some monsters too. I never thought about it before; I always used Poser 4 to make things like this...

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And go ahead and take 16 angled rotation pictures if you want to, since ZDoom supports it.

Many times I've wished that ID would have gone ahead and saved more angles and higher resolution pictures and maybe included them as a "High-res" mode in the original game. Or saved them for use in source ports (ha).

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Here's the front view of the new model of my cacodemon:


View A2
View A3
View A4
View A5
View A6
View A7
View A8
Alternate (better?) front view A1


I tried to follow the id model closer this time, with some artistic licenses to make it more suitable to work with at this scale. Even though the monster looks a simple round ball, it's full of protrusions and tiny details like horns, lobes, glands, orifices and pseudopoda, not to mention those damn teeth. This makes handling it awkard, and the model fragile :-(

Anyway, I believe plasticine gives it an organic quality that's lacking from the original, and is even preserved at Doom's resolution. It's the first time I found the cacodemon actually disgusting ;-)

Anyway, it's late, I'll do attack animations tomorrow. If positive input continues, I'll extend an invitation for some assistance (there's a some palette and scale adaptation work to do before these can be turned into useful sprites).

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Hey, that turned out pretty good. I'm interested to see where this goes. :)

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Mr. Chris said:

How are you gonna do the squishy death for the caco?


Keep punching the clay with your hand

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Mr. Chris said:

How are you gonna do the squishy death for the caco?


I was wondering about that...directly damaging the model will of course be more satisfying, but it's a one-way road, so I can't reuse it for anything else afterwards, save scrapping its plasticine for another use. Cheating and using image editing is another possibility. Or probably both.

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what if you make a sculpture of it's guts, then merge them on psp?
Or perhaps a sequence were it explodes on guts.

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Of course, unless we want the mod to be an experiment in clay animation, we may have to reduce the gloss and give them textures (proper sense). ("We" didn't include me in their creation)

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I'm in no way an expert in clay animation, and there are aspects of it that I am not very adept at, like e.g. the proper way to photograph the model, what postprocessing to apply, how to keep coloring/lighting even between different postures etc.

As of now, I take pics at 640*480 resolution (makes them easier to process, with IMO the right amount of detail for the final use), with strobe enabled, against a cardboard background, and manually extrude the wanted portions with PSP.

To hold the cacodemon, since it's too flimsy to "sit" on a pedestal, I impaled it on a pen (!) and rotated it by hand. Biped monsters with a skeleton may actually be easier to handle.

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Make a copy of it and tear that apart. It doesn't have to be exact since you're going to destroy it anyway.

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Have you considered using this (very cool) method to make one of the missing monsters for FreeDoom?

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I plan to use this to make new monsters with less effort than drawing them or modeling them in 3D (at least for me). I chose the caco as a first effort because it looked easy enough. Of course any project requiring new sprites can use this method, the only issue is if making exact (or close) replicas of Doom's monsters would be acceptable as a free resource.

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For FreeDoom, I meant an original design, made in this style. A close match to an original Doom monster wouldn't be accepted.

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jute said:

For FreeDoom, I meant an original design, made in this style. A close match to an original Doom monster wouldn't be accepted.


I honestly don't think that should be a problem in the case of the cacodemon. id Software modeled directly after the beholder of Dungeons and Dragons, which in turn was named after the greek cacodaemon.

Ultimately it is up to the Freedoom crew to decide what is acceptable anyway.

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