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MinerOfWorlds

Why are there no good 3d models for doom?

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I play quake a lot with a mod to give it better models and they look really good but doom has no good 3d models are the formats that doom uses harder to work with? or did no one care to give doom good 3d models

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I think one factor is that they don't look as good as Quake anyway, because there isn't proper lighting in Doom. It is a 2.5D engine, not 3D.

Also, the animations in Doom can't be smooth because of the way the game works. It is designed for sprites.

You can directly put Quake's models in Doom I believe, they will look worse because of the lighting and their animations will constantly be cut off.

I used to play Oblige maps with 3D models in Doomsday a loooong time ago because I didn't have internet at home. I don't know what the fuck was going through my brain...

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VGA said:

I think one factor is that they don't look as good as Quake anyway, because there isn't proper lighting in Doom. It is a 2.5D engine, not 3D.

Also, the animations in Doom can't be smooth because of the way the game works. It is designed for sprites.


I thought open-gl source port's fixed this.

VGA said:

I used to play Oblige maps with 3D models in Doomsday a loooong time ago because I didn't have internet at home. I don't know what the fuck was going through my brain...


Either you thought the 3d models suck or you need more wads.

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Even with the current best 3D Models they felt out of place for some reason, or maybe It's just because no one took enough time to make good 3D Models .

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MinerOfWorlds said:

I thought open-gl source port's fixed this.

You can't "fix this" without completely changing how monster movement and animations work.

And if you do "fix this" then you'll have to say goodbye to everything that requires movement and animations to work how they always did, such as demo compatibility (very important for GLBoom+) or DEHACKED support (important for pretty much every port).

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So does that mean Quakes Demos are radically different from dooms? (sorry if this is an ignorant question)

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A Quake demo isn't going to be played back correctly by a Doom port, yes...


But it's not a question of architecture. Take Chocolate Doom, and introduce just a tiny change -- say, monster cannot rotate more than 30° per tic instead of changing their angle immediately. Then introduce more changes to account for this, like putting repeated calls to A_FaceTarget in their attack state sequence because just one might no longer be enough. Note that you don't change the demo format at all, you merely change monster behavior. Well, what do you think happen to the demos? They all desync.

Demos don't store monster actions, they're recomputed on-the-fly thanks to Doom's deterministic model. But if you change the model (by changing how the monsters behave) then it's no longer going to be compatible with the old model, is it?

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Beautiful answer, thank you very much. As for the Op, it seems to me if Doom assets and modded weapons for Darkplaces engine where created it would be able to make the "3d Doom2" That quite a few (at least it seems to me) players are interested in seeing.

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Let us examine games that started out as 2D pixel art and eventually made the leap to 3D. Why did this work, for instance, with Mario? Probably because Mario is overtly cartoonish, with a lot of rounded corners, thick black lines and items/powerups that were more symbolic than representational, such as coins, mushrooms flowers. This sort of thing works very well in 3D, because it's not very difficult to imagine an exact translation of those elements in higher dimensions.

Doom, however, has a very complex art style. The enemies are a mixture of pixel art and scanned photos of sculptures. It is semi-photorealistic, yet distinctly low res. It's semi-cartoonish, but highly detailed. Their lighting is very dramatic, but due to the resolution, anatomical details are mostly obscured. So imagine trying to translate this into 3D. Good luck on that!

Thus, most every effort has failed not only because the artists were generally not professional grade, but also because the attempt to base the models on the sprite was staggeringly literal. Even Doom Ascension, which is perhaps the most realistic effort, still looks kind of weird because the artists are so insistent on trying to stick closely to the source material. Even Doom 2016 suffered from this issue, as the pinky for instance looks distinctly more cartoonish than many of its brethren.

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The old Doom games just don't feel right in 3D. Admittedly the Doom: Ascension models are the best so far. But... it still isn't the same. Sprites forever!

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Gez said:

You can't "fix this" without completely changing how monster movement and animations work.

And if you do "fix this" then you'll have to say goodbye to everything that requires movement and animations to work how they always did, such as demo compatibility (very important for GLBoom+) or DEHACKED support (important for pretty much every port).


that sucks i was hoping for someone to make a good 3d doom mod.

GoatLord said:

pinky for instance looks distinctly more cartoonish than many of its brethren.


I thought that was the new design.

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There have been several attempts at making either hi-res 3D models or hi-res sprites for Doom, but they mostly lose momentum because of one or more of these factors:

  • They are often one-man projects, for a task that would require an entire team of dedicated artists. I've yet to see any of them (including Doom Ascension) get beyond the zombies, Imp, and maybe Demon.
  • The results are limited by the capabilities of available source ports, or they are tied to a specific, not-so-popular source port which eventually becomes outdated. Where/how you can use Doom Ascension models, again?
For voxels, the situation is pretty much similar. Did even a single monster get voxelized?

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What would be really interesting is if someone managed to get a mesh 3d scan of the original clay and rubber models and managed to texture them, animate them and put them into a source port.

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There are quite a few reason why that will never happend, some are locked down at id, some adrian still own, if someone wanted to go that route the reaper miniture models would be the best bet. But they'd still have to be rigged for movement.

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Someone had tried to -kinda- do that based on a Reaper miniature of the pinky a couple of years ago.

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1232016

I'm not sure if he produced a 3D model based just on multi-angle photos, or if he already had a 3D model from somewhere.

As expected, it was rather labor-intensive, and that's just for one pose. In order to make a fluidly animated 3D model with the quality expected of a modern 3D game, there would be much more post-processing and know-how involved.

Directly working with voxels is something nobody does, because they don't offer the same editing capabilities of a traditional polygonal model: so practical voxel models will have a conventional 3D mesh as a base, except maybe for any manual retouching/postprocessing/cleanup.

The key words here are: labor intensive and highly specialized task. Unless you're an accomplished 3D modeler, don't even bother. And it's one thing doing one pose for shits & giggles/proof of concept, and another is ploughing away at the arduous task of doing a complete 3D modeling job.

In fact, I think that besides the creation of the first model, this "photo capturing model" only saves a fraction of the total work required: all the rest is purely 3D modeling. And rather than starting off with a model "frozen" in a very specific pose, a professional modeler would prefer more neutral/flexible one to work with.

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Not really. I've done my fair share of 3d modelling and if you properly scan the originals with a good 3d scanner you save a ton of time working on inane detailing. Much like working with a good photo brings faster great results than drawing something from scratch as the concept of something looking good, goes hand in hand with how natural it looks. Sure you'd need to clean it up, and split it into parts to make it animate properly, but you could use a bone system for animation like that.

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Monster voxels are a painful prospect because you have to make one voxel per sprite frame. And making one voxel model is more work than making even eight sprites for full rotations.

With normal models, you make the monster once and then you animate it, it's a lot of work but you can get the hang of it and animating a model is simpler than making a different model for each frame of animation.

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There are converters which can turn a polygonal mesh into a voxel data set. I imagine that if someone made a decent 3D model of an enemy that closely resembled the sprite, then converted all the animation to voxels, it might not look bad. But seeing those screenshots of the voxel pinky points yet again to the awkward look of literal translations of the sprites into three dimensions. Part of me feels like we're going to keep seeing brave but ultimately doomed (heh) attempts at 3D modeling. Maybe at some point in the future, the tools will become intuitive and smart enough that a single person could accomplish this task easily, but that won't be for a few years at least.

In all honesty, I would much rather see someone try to make more mature versions of the Doom 64 monster roster (including the cut models such as the female archvile) in 3D, which I think hold the potential to look more interesting.

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RightField said:

Not really. I've done my fair share of 3d modelling and if you properly scan the originals with a good 3d scanner you save a ton of time working on inane detailing.


What I meant is: look at that Reaper miniature pinky: it's already in a pretty tense, croucing pose, with its mouth gaping open and teeth sticking out.

How much work would be to morph that into a (good looking) attack pose, with the monster standing on two united feet and its mouth mostly closed (lips, anyone?), without it looking like a loose, wrinkly suit of a pinky worn by a deformable skeleton? You would need to define proper joints, rigid/nonrigid areas of its body etc. and surely, not all starting points are equally well suited.

@GoatLord: what you're witnessing is the difference between something automatically generated, and something purpose-designed to be a voxel sprite. Just like simply scaling down a photo or a drawing doesn't automatically make a good sprite: artists know which color combinations look better, they correct unwanted blurring/blending, and add animation detail in the proper places so that the result doesn't look like a noisy mess of pixels, and doesn't look stiff when moving.

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I was talking about scanning the original models (a pipe dream but still) not the reaper ones, they're lacking in detail from the get go.

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GoatLord said:

In all honesty, I would much rather see someone try to make more mature versions of the Doom 64 monster roster (including the cut models such as the female archvile) in 3D, which I think hold the potential to look more interesting.


Me too but doom 2 is much more popular then doom 64 so you get known faster from making a mod for doom 2.

MrGlide said:

it seems to me if Doom assets and modded weapons for Darkplaces engine where created it would be able to make the "3d Doom2" That quite a few (at least it seems to me) players are interested in seeing.


I want that but i would want doom 1 or 64 i didn't like doom 2 that much.

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RightField said:

I was talking about scanning the original models (a pipe dream but still) not the reaper ones, they're lacking in detail from the get go.


Not all of the original models were as detailed as people think (e.g. the Baron, apart from it's face, would gain very little, and the player almost nothing). Other sprites, like the Imp and zombies, didn't even have a clay or other kind of physical model, but we're mostly based on reskins of the Player's sprite. So even if the original clay models were somehow recovered from the trash and uncrumbled from their shapeless, dried-out lumpy forms, and the latex models unmelted back into their original state, it would still be a half-job.

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As I already said in another thread, people should really take some pointers from how they did the models in quake when creating 3D stuff for Doom. One problem I notice is that every time people make 3D models for Doom they make way too high poly, detailed, or have a texture that is too high-res. I think Doom models should be low poly like the Quake 1 models, because anything too fancy will contrast poorly with the unrealistic/abstract geometry of Doom's maps, and of course, the flat lighting.
But then on the flip side we have the ZDoom Gl models that are just... bad. Badly animated, and badly modeled. They are low-poly/low-res, but they just look plain ugly.

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Yeah, I would say both highly detailed models and high resolution textures look totally fucked in Doom and not enough modders seem to understand that. To this day no one has made a decent high res texture pack for Doom because it just looks weird to see VGA sprites mixed with true color textures at 1024x1024. I mean what.

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RightField said:

I was talking about scanning the original models (a pipe dream but still) not the reaper ones, they're lacking in detail from the get go.

They are mostly destroyed. Also, they only used clay models for some specific monsters, right? Not all.

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I tried some 3D models for JDoom that didn't look bad - but the animations always were really shitty. Like some stiff and weightless cardboard box robots. I don't know if it's a limitation of the engine or the fault of the modellers.

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A huge factor in animation, above all, is timing. You've got these models, and not only are they being slapped across the original sprites' number of frames and their state lengths, but they're also being interpolated as well. With this, what would be 10 frames of motionlessness with sprites is instead 10 frames of sloooowly adjusting to the next position. This leads to the unnatural, floaty look you see in a lot of these models, compounded by the fact that a lot of the same models don't do a good job of recreating the animations anyways (Remember the imp from the GZDoom model pack that just lazily slapped at the player?).

This is also why Hunter's Moon looks as decent as it does, because all the animations were either handled by a practiced animator or copied from Doom 3/Quake 3, and the environments are at a matching level of fidelity.

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Well, that's exactly the problem: some people hope that one day some magic fairy (or super-algorithm) will effortlessly create high-detail, flawlessly animated 3D models starting from 8 rotations of low-res sprites for every unskilled, poor sod to enjoy. Might as well go get one of those "university diplomas based on your life experience, no books, no courses, no exams!".

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People are forgetting that not a lot of modelers out there are able to make professional quality models so that's yet another reason why they don't look so good nor animate well, besides it's not like they are being paid for their work. Also not all the good modelers out there are interested in modeling for an older game such as Doom, they are more likely interested in modeling for some of the newer and more popular/relevant games.

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