General artistic tips on sprite creation

I'm creating my own sprites and working it out as I go, so I could use some general tips. Later I can compile them and insert them into the first post of this thread, to serve as a general guide to creating sprites.

I'm looking for any advice, such as: do you use any real life references, how do you work on layers, how do you make enemies or pickups visible, or very specific things, such as how many colors or shades to use per sprite to still make it visible, or how to account for aspect ratio correction (or lack thereof) to make the sprite look good all the time.

Shoot at me with whatever you have. My takeaways are:

- if you are working with a referential picture, reduce its color palette almost immediately to avoid having to clean up messy looking pixels after (if) you convert the sprite to Doom format.

- Go crazy with new layers. Do not combine layers EVER.

- Use approx. 4 shades of any color, more and the sprite looks messy, fewer and it looks simplistic.

In the tutorials section I have my collection of tutorials and among them there are reprints

of Eriance's (now Amuscaria) Spriting tutorials, under Various Topics.They may be of some help.

You may also be interested in Amuscaria's Hellforge mapping efforts with lots of new actors, weapons and monsters and such.

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=13397

Having done some minor decorate this is what I found to be useful:

If you use a resource like a photograph;

- within the 24-bit original, adjust colors to match Doom's palette first. Make it greyscale and later recolor it using Doom's palette if you must.

- always sharpen after downsizing. How much depends on the source image and your taste.

- clean up stray pixels, even if it's just 5 single ones. It'll make a difference.

- make some brightmaps while you're at it. They make a big difference.

- regarding antialiasing, have the lightlevel of the area the sprite is used in, in mind. You can antialias, it depends on the map how much. If the background is very bright, don't dither to totally black of course. I usually go for a mid grey / brown, because that's what most Doom textures look like, but exceptions are the rule of course.

- keep the Doomguy's point of view in mind and use a fitting perspective. If the perspective is off it looks awkward.

I was just checking out the tutorials KappesBuur linked and they are by far the most detailed, eye opening and best tutorials about spriting, that I have seen so far. Go check them out, they are amazing.

10 hours ago, Kappes Buur said:

In the tutorials section I have my collection of tutorials and among them there are reprints

of Eriance's (now Amuscaria) Spriting tutorials, under Various Topics.They may be of some help.

 

These are the best tutorials I've seen yet. Thank you!

@Kappes Buur I created my first sprite using your tutorial and it looks better than I would've expected.

That... looks indeed better than especially I expected. Good job, man! Keep it up and soon you'll make gorgeous custom monsters everybody wants to have in his WADs.

Thanks! I've never done anything that's so much fun.

11 hours ago, Szuran said:

@Kappes Buur I created my first sprite using your tutorial and it looks better than I would've expected.

Don't credit me for the tutorials, I just resurrected them because the originals are kind of useless without the illustrations and I thought those tutorials should be preserved.

The credit goes to Amuscaria.

 @Kappes Buur

Thanks for preserving then. I hate it when I look for tutorials and only find old forum posts with invalid image links to sites that are long gone. ;_(