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darknation

spriting.

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working on a sprite, no idea what sort of weapon to give the little fucker. Might end up in a doom wad some day as a basic enemy so no nukes plzz. Suggestions welcome.

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darknation said:

no idea what sort of weapon to give the little fucker.

The first thing that popped into my head was a shotgun...

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Vanilla doom makes this look ghetto as fuck. Disappointing.

edit: animation sheet for anyone interested. Shotgun arms are placeholders, I know they suck.

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darknation said:

Vanilla doom makes this look ghetto as fuck. Disappointing.

Yeah, that is a bit of a letdown... er, no offense.

Good try though.

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darknation said:

Vanilla doom makes this look ghetto as fuck. Disappointing.

How are you converting the sprites? Cause to me it just looks like it's trying to dither the colors to the doom palette instead of picking the closest color. slade should be able to convert them into a pretty alright way?

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problem with the helmet colour conversion is that I'm using filters to create shading. This is something that I deliberately set out to avoid this time around, because using too many of them at once makes Freehand spaz out and break, but then I got lazy and said 'fuck it'.

Anyway, the lens filters are not doom palette compatible and really shit the bed when it comes to conversion. It is fixable. Want to redo the helmet anyway, the sides run at a fucking shitty angle for pixel conversion. Should have known that when I was making it but lol suckage.

Looking at it fresh in the morning, I see where the animation problems are as well; the body is detached from the legs somewhat, giving it an unnatural bob, the arms are fucking shit and the shotgun clips through the glove. Leg movement needs to be kept tighter to the central plane and rather than have the shotgun move up and down, it needs to move from side to side.

Will consider these problems tonight at work and see if I can design a three stage dolly to make the shotgun arms worth looking at. Realize that the first animation sucks, but basically all my first animation cycles suck. You make something, animate it roughly to see where the problems are, then go back in and fix the motherfucker with extreme prejudice.

Onwards!

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Rough dope of the shotgun animation + reining in his bobbing bullshit. Much better already. Will probably try to put a *little* upper movement on it.

Next thing is to add a strap hanging down from the shotgun to add a little sway to the movements / conceal some of the dodgy bits in the leg animation.

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going for the 360 rotation. Drunk as fuck right now and no one cares, but this is useful shit for the future if anyone is following.






* Also drunk.

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darknation said:

but this is useful shit for the future if anyone is following


That is pretty useful, the green boxes lining up the sprites to keep the shapes consistent ive never seen that done before but it makes drawing rotations look like it makes more sense

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Some ports (such as ZDoom) allow you to set the scale of the actor, without having to resort to resizing the sprites of the actor yourself with a graphics editor such as Photoshop, Paint.net or GIMP.

There is no way to do it in vanilla Doom, sadly.

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Dinosawr said:

-Made First Post-


Welcome to Doomworld. :)

@Darknation, has there been any progress on these sprites? It's been a while!

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Not really, I've been busy / drunk.

In answer to the scale question, there are issues with going over a certain size. My rule is that for every doubling in size you need to double the number of animation frames to maintain a smooth motion. Going from 4 frames to 8 is a massive increase in labour, and I'm a lazy fuck at the best of times.

It's also easier to work on a smaller scale: the blurring of pixels can act as a motion blur, allowing greater freedom to cheat like fuck and make some pretty dodgy structural decisions look acceptable.

Going forward, I'm toying with the idea of making a wolf 3d map. Something simple that relies entirely on cunning texture work in order to look good.

Don't hold your breath tho. I am astonishingly lazy.

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I've already started on my own high resolution stuff, I'm glad that it can work, even if it might look janky.

Maybe release the highres stuff for us to try out, because it does look beautiful.

@Dragonfly,thanks! I can't create my own thread yet, but when I do I'll show you all some stuff I've been working on for school.

I'm kindof mad that I never did look into wad creation before.

I'd also be excited to see what you do next @Darknation.

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Tonight's work.

The animation cycle is pretty much fucked. A1 looks too similar to A2 to convey motion and the whole thing slides across the floor like he's skating. I need to get the feet to impact and lift better. The shotgun also needs tweaked to give it a 3D feel and the arms are too static for my liking.

Will probably need to add something eye catching on the leg to hide shady animation / give a clue as to which leg is which. A fucking wallet chain or something to give the brain a clue as to what the fuck is happening.

Still, overall it's not terrible. The 45 degree cycle will be next and should be fun. And when I say fun, I mean fucking hell on earth.

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it'll be ok, just a little tweeking of the legs and youll be straight, I think the arms look good. On A1 his right leg I think should be extended back a little bit more, such as A4's left leg. then bring A2's knee forward and heel up more(like a mid jog stance almost.) A3's left leg can come back just a tad. It's really nice work and I really dig the feel of this guy. I'm just trying to be helpfull.

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that looks like he's injured and in a hurry to me. It would be cool if that's how he ran on low health.

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Last post tonight, then bed I swear.

Someone asked about my process the other day, and I thought it might be helpful to go through it stage by stage. First post on this subject will be actual model making process itself; I'll do animation next time I'm actually animating something.

This is Macromedia Freehand. It is made of vectors and win. My usual workspace is a cluttered hellhole of detached limbs, floating palettes and crudely drawn cocks, but I've cleaned it up and shit.



Freehand is a dead program because Adobe bought Macromedia and are useless fucking cocksuckers. The modern day equivalent is probably Adobe Illustrator; I wouldn't know, because I'm fucking old school. Some might use Flash to achieve the same results, because you can animate using Flash and save yourself a buttload of effort. Such people are also cocksuckers.

As you can see, I have zoomed in 800% to make my life a living hell. There is no logical reason for this, other than I tend to draw small in real life and zooming in until you physically cannot zoom anymore gives me a massive erection.

The first column, then. This is the basic maquette I made without any highlights or bullshit. Everything is made from simple polygonal shapes to make animation easier. In this instance, I have also been uber clever, and ensured that the shapes I used can be used during the sprite rotations with little / no editing. One simply moves the arm, for example, midway across the torso, blasts a 110% enlargement on the bastard and calls it a day. This is because I am smart, and smart people make their maquettes as simple as they can.

What can't be rotated in this way is designed to be as simple and box-like as possible. The shotgun, for example, is a fucking brick because drawing bricks in perspective is easy and drawing shotguns in perspective is hard. So fuck drawing shotguns.

The second column features the shading, which is drawn with vectors in exactly the same way as one would draw shotguns. This is really the texture layer; I'll add in shading / highlights here and there as I go, but really what I'm after here is the illusion of texture. The metal breastplate, for example, has been highlighted with gouges and dents in mind whilst the fabric of the arms has smaller, more subtle creases that evoke fabric. These shapes will change a little from frame to frame, which is fine because fabric moves and metal refracts light differently depending on which angle you look at it. The shapes of the armature will remain static for the most part.

The third stage is using lens filters to achieve depth. Lens effects (shaders, basically) can be piled layer upon layer, but they are also gay and break my computer. So I try to use as few shaders as possible and do as much work as I can with the textures underneath. It is also difficult to predict exactly what colour you are going to end up with; in this instance, I used a lens to create a glass effect, which looks nice until you try to convert it to a specific palette (doom) and then it looks like vomit. So don't do that.

I'll do animation next time.

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darknation said:

because Adobe bought Macromedia and are useless fucking cocksuckers.

I see your point. I have this love-hate relationship with Adobe as well, who make a bunch of dumbass moves, such as killing off Creative Suite and replacing it with a subscription service. (Not that it matters to me, because I use GIMP instead of PS, but you get my drift.)
Also, why else would I not want to use Reader if it's bloated? Sumatra PDF does everything I want for a PDF reader, all without the bloat and gimmicks.

Anyway, good luck doing the animations.

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Getting there, but the upper torso on this is going to be bobbing everywhere. I hummed and hawed over this, and finally came up with this idea.



The small square indicates where the foot needs to be during the next frame. The rectangle indicates where the waist should be for the next frame. By copy+pasting the boxes over, I can see roughly where everything ought to be and save myself a lot of fucking about.

Will it work? Fuck knows! I'm now making this shit up as I go along because I have never actually properly animated at the 45 degree angle before.

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