Super smooth rotation?

[Spicy Cacodemon]

Ever noticed how most if not all the sprites in Doom style games have really stiff animation?   \ | /

Walking around an Imp you'll notice it has 8 different sprites while still.                                ↼     ⇀

                                                                                                                                        / | \
My question is would it be possible to make all the rotating sprites in Doom turn smoothly by adding more frames?

Making all those sprites would suck but it would be well worth it. If I knew how to do it I could give it a try.

I know Gifty's Smooth Doom and Jekyll's Beatiful Doom exist already but from what I can tell they haven't done this yet.

 

                 

[elend]

Seeing what Smooth Doom achieved I'd say it's possible, but who is going to edit all those sprites? That's quite a lot of frames of animations and directions. This might be the biggest hurdle for a project like this.

 

Nonetheless, it would greatly enhance the look and feel of Doom similar to what Smooth Doom did, yes. I'd love to see something like this.

[Empyre]

In ZDoom, you can add 8 more angles, for a total of 16.

https://zdoom.org/wiki/Sprite

[Teder]

It is possible, but this really huge work to do. As always best thing is build 3d model and sprites from it. But this is still much of work. My favorites models are these:

 

But, as author said they aren't animated. Project looks like that for now.

 

This thread (dead too) looks interesting too.

 

I think the best way is to build models. Do you remember JDoom/Doomsday models. At that time they were quite good. Most curious thing for me that Duke Nukem community made really really good mod for DN - HRP. Everything looks faithfull to original sprites and textures. DOOM remake modding stopped on JDoom/Doomsday.

Edited August 26, 2018 by Teder

[elend]

Sure the most logical and time saving thing would be to create 3D models, but come on... they just don't look like the original sprites. In some cases they are even quite ugly.

 

Gotta check out that DN3D thing, sounds interesting.

[Pegleg]

13 hours ago, elend said:

Sure the most logical and time saving thing would be to create 3D models, but come on... they just don't look like the original sprites. In some cases they are even quite ugly.

I agree. In fact, I remember looking at the JDoom sprites back around 2003 or 2004. At the time, JDoom was the most advanced Doom, but, the monsters just didn't look like the original sprites--more 3D, yes, more Quake-like, yes, but they just didn't look like Doom to me.

 

If 3D models could be made that looked generally like the sprites (at least some of them were based on models, after all), then that would be useful.

[Barry Burton]

2 hours ago, Pegleg said:

I agree. In fact, I remember looking at the JDoom sprites back around 2003 or 2004. At the time, JDoom was the most advanced Doom, but, the monsters just didn't look like the original sprites--more 3D, yes, more Quake-like, yes, but they just didn't look like Doom to me.

 

If 3D models could be made that looked generally like the sprites (at least some of them were based on models, after all), then that would be useful.

 

That's what voxels are for.

[Teder]

Can we make animated voxels for Doom? I know non-animated in Doom but didn't see animated. Voxels was my first tough btw :)

[Empyre]

Making animated voxels can be done, but it would take far more effort than drawing 16 angles for your sprites by hand.

[KVELLER]

48 minutes ago, Empyre said:

Making animated voxels can be done, but it would take far more effort than drawing 16 angles for your sprites by hand.

 

I thought (G)ZDoom didn't support animated voxels? Or do you mean exporting the voxels as models and animating them that way?

[kb1]

On 8/26/2018 at 4:14 AM, Spicy Cacodemon said:

Ever noticed how most if not all the sprites in Doom style games have really stiff animation?   \ | /

Walking around an Imp you'll notice it has 8 different sprites while still.                                ↼     ⇀

                                                                                                                                        / | \
My question is would it be possible to make all the rotating sprites in Doom turn smoothly by adding more frames?

Making all those sprites would suck but it would be well worth it. If I knew how to do it I could give it a try.

I know Gifty's Smooth Doom and Jekyll's Beatiful Doom exist already but from what I can tell they haven't done this yet.

 

                 

Do you feel like you're able to do justice to adding new angle frames to all the Doom animated sprites? I would like to support such an effort, possibly even financially, if they were up to par! Maybe some others would join in.

 

Problem is, that's A LOT of sprites. You'd have to draw as many new sprites as there are in Doom, just to go with 16 vs. 8 angles. 3x as many to go with 32 angles. This would be a full-time job, depending on how fast you were, of course, for a long time, I would think. I suppose you could do a couple of monsters, and release updates, but it would be awkward to have some monsters with 16, and the others with 8, wouldn't it? I don't know. I'd love to have them, though!

[DooMAD]

On 8/27/2018 at 8:48 PM, KVELLER said:

 

I thought (G)ZDoom didn't support animated voxels? Or do you mean exporting the voxels as models and animating them that way?

 

There's no reason why it can't be done, people have already made smaller animated voxels to use in Doom.  The 'health potion', for example, has multiple frames, so that's animated.  Even the key-cards have two frames so they can blink slightly.  Those all work in ZDoom just fine (and I assume the same for GZDoom).  There were two reasons I didn't attempt to make any of the monsters in voxel format.  Firstly, the software I was using sucked and had some serious memory leaks, meaning it couldn't cope with anything much larger than a Medkit.  And secondly, I'm not much of an artist and it takes more talent than I'm capable of.

[Spicy Cacodemon]

I've been a member for over 2 years now but I've never finished or released anything, I just ask stupid noob questions.

Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up with this topic, I was just wondering whether such a thing was possible. I do have an idea though.

HD models already exist so someone less lazy than me could make a video or some gifs of each model rotating and attacking.

One could then use them as a template, painting over each frame in Photoshop. It would still be a super difficult ambitious task but it's doable.

[kb1]

I await your finished product :)

[elend]

I just recently had a closer look at the HDoom sprites (...) and uhm... yeah... uh... what was I about to say? Oh yeah, I had a closer look and whatever you think of HDoom and its content, the sprite work is nothing short of amazing. Especially the very smooth animation. If someone could start and actually finish a project like this, it'd be this guy.

 

I'd also back this financially.

^{(geez, I must be crazy...)}

[kb1]

4 hours ago, elend said:

I'd also back this financially.

^{(geez, I must be crazy...)}

I was thinking the same thing (about my offer). You can't take it with you...

[KVELLER]

17 hours ago, DooMAD said:

There's no reason why it can't be done, people have already made smaller animated voxels to use in Doom.  The 'health potion', for example, has multiple frames, so that's animated.  Even the key-cards have two frames so they can blink slightly.  Those all work in ZDoom just fine (and I assume the same for GZDoom).  There were two reasons I didn't attempt to make any of the monsters in voxel format.  Firstly, the software I was using sucked and had some serious memory leaks, meaning it couldn't cope with anything much larger than a Medkit.  And secondly, I'm not much of an artist and it takes more talent than I'm capable of.

 

Yes, they're technically animated, but I meant having animations without the need of multiple voxel lumps, so you could have diagonals and whatnot.

[DooMAD]

6 hours ago, KVELLER said:

 

Yes, they're technically animated, but I meant having animations without the need of multiple voxel lumps, so you could have diagonals and whatnot.

 

Diagonals?  You don't need any rotational monster frames with voxels, so there would be fewer frames in total.

 

The chaingunner, for example, has 69 frames with normal sprites, but with voxels, I'm pretty sure you could do it with just 20 frames.  As a small realism bonus, if you shoot them in the back when you kill them, they wouldn't instantly turn to face you like the sprites do.

 

Instead of having CPOSA1, CPOSA2, CPOSA3, CPOSA4, CPOSA5, CPOSA6, CPOSA7 and CPOSA8 for each direction (or more if you wanted more sprite directions, like 16), you can replace all of that with a single "CPOSA" which can be viewed from any angle.

Edited August 30, 2018 by DooMAD

[elend]

 

Yeah, basically like this here. I could imagine that this still looks fairly true to the original, but that'd be a huge amount of voxels. I guess my laptop would complain a bit.

[KVELLER]

@DooMAD Agh... I'm sorry, I'm having non-native speaker issues and can't seem to express myself properly. Maybe a GIF would explain it better than my words:

 

 

Would something like that be possible in GZDoom?

[DooMAD]

@KVELLER Ah, that seems unlikely, heh.  I could be wrong, but I suspect that kind of animation would only be possible if someone re-wrote the rendering code.