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Halmburgur

How Did ID make sprites for doom & doom2?

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It's kind of amazing how much work goes into those models only to be converted into 320x200 pixelated 2Dness.

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Hellbent said:

It's kind of amazing how much work goes into those models only to be converted into 320x200 pixelated 2Dness.


and how adrian and kevin did so well on them to make them look as believeable as possible. With the exception of the Spider Mastermind. She looks a little washed out compared to the other monsters.

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Hellbent said:

It's kind of amazing how much work goes into those models only to be converted into 320x200 pixelated 2Dness.

I doubt it's less work manually drawing those admitedly small sprites.

Side note: Anyone have a clue which texture is based on a wound of Kevin Cloud's knee? Skincut?

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I don't have XWE on this computer, but in Doom 1 there's a skin texture with a SUPPORT2 style border around it, and in the middle of the three blocks there looks like a grayish burn mark, almost like a giant ciggarette burn. you can see the cracks in the skin surrounding it which makes it look most likely to be a photograph.

EDIT: This one. Thank you PL2.

http://jbserver.com/forums/attachments/8348_Screenshot_Doom_20090130_210650.png

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Seeing how Id made their sprites, I am betting the gibbing animations for the former humans and imp took some time to do.

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Here' and image of the arch-vile model and here of the cyberdemon one.

Also, my guess is that the trooper and shotgun zombie sprites are merely modified doomguy graphics. The resemblance in poses, gib animations and other detail is very obvious. In a similar fashion the pain elemental graphics have a lot of bits likely copied from the cacodemon sprites (which in turn are based on the AD&D astral dreadnought illustration), the hell knight is a recoloured version of the baron, the arachnotron is a recoloured miniature version of the spiderdemon and so on. Essentially the only sprite sets that were probably drawn completely from scratch are commando's, demon's, imp's and lost soul's.

EDIT: By the way, why is this in Everything Else?

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The Zombies are modified doom marine sprites. John mentioned this when he still frequent his board. Also John said the rocket launcher was a heavily modified version of the shotgun. I though the plasma rifle was modified but he assured my post this was false. I believe the Chain gunner is a modified wolf sprite. I believe this was covered here a while ago.

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I do know that the Baron, cyberdemon, and doomguy models were made from clay, while the models for the mastermind, arch vile, mancubus, and the revenent were made from metal and latex. It's likely that they switched from clay to metal and latex since it was easier to work with as in the models could easily be repositioned for different poses.

On a side note, the hands you see for the weapon hud sprites are in fact Kevin Cloud's.

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That makes sense, although the clay models produced better results, in my opinion.

Janizdreg said:
By the way, why is this in Everything Else?

No idea, but fixed!

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Technician said:

I believe the Chain gunner is a modified wolf sprite.

Yeah. When I first saw them ingame, I thought they looked a bit too cartoony and also two-dimensional, unlike their shotgun counterparts.

I agree that the clay monsters look better ingame. The Mastermind, Archvile, Mancubus and Revenant look either too hysterical or jerky.

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I actually like how the chaingunner turned out. I think id should have given him a bit more health though, as he has some pretty heavy armor on.

And Plutonia wouldn't be the same without 'em.

EDIT: Wow the original revenant looks scary, but Doom seems to have a subliminal comedy part to it so having some bloody mess wouldn't fit with everything else.

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I always thought the chaingunners looked like some of the bosses from Wolf 3D, so that makes sense.

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Csonicgo said:

EDIT: Wow the original revenant looks scary, but Doom seems to have a subliminal comedy part to it so having some bloody mess wouldn't fit with everything else.


I think it was just a matter of detail, that small scale ripped gore look probably doesn´t translate well into a tiny pixilated sprite. But the final sprite for the Revenant is still bloodied (I used to interprete it as red pants, but it´s supposed to be blood).

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Csonicgo said:

I think id should have given him a bit more health though, as he has some pretty heavy armor on.

Danarchy said:

I always thought the chaingunners looked like some of the bosses from Wolf 3D, so that makes sense.

For your chaingunner wolf3d worries, go get the Double Chaingunner from the bestiary. You can even (and I recommend it) place it in Doom 1.

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Mr. Chris said:

Seeing how Id made their sprites, I am betting the gibbing animations for the former humans and imp took some time to do.


Both the dying animations and gibbing animations look a lot more synthetic than their walking animations do. I'm pretty sure that stuff was done by the graphics artists.

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I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how they made all of the graphics. A lot of the graphics in game were not made from models. I think monsters like imps, cacodemons, pain elementals and perhaps lost souls were manually drawn. So were a lot of the textures and obviously almost all of the non-monsters or weapon HUD view sprites.

John Carmack had designed a special graphics editing tool for them which helped a lot. I've never seen it before but I think it had to do with lightening and darkening images and also changing colors within the Doom palette itself.

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Quoted from an article on Gamasutra:

The models are placed on a revolving tray where they are secured to the base. There are eight pegs in the tray that represent the eight points of view that are needed by the game engine to render the creatures. Next, the models are animated frame by frame by moving the model and then rotating it to each specific vantage point the engine uses to display it.

The images are digitized by a video camera hooked up to the NeXT machine. When each frame is captured, it is imported over the network into a PC running Electronic Arts’ Dpaint, where the photographic source is translated into the resolution of the game. The images are drawn at full brightness, and the game engine varies the contrast for light sourcing.



Gregor Punchatz created a setup that would easily allow the results to be digitized.

See the article here -> http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21405

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myk said:

That makes sense, although the clay models produced better results, in my opinion.

I agree. It's easier to fine tune the clay and since it wasn't colored in advance. There's less issues with the coloring of them. (the spiderdemon in particular suffer from this)

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