What's the best way to create custom sprites for DOOM?

[Ar_e_en]

I have been experimenting with SLADE for a couple of weeks now, seeing what I can do with it. Right now, I am messing around with replacing sprites and I have made one.

 

It replaces that one hanged guy (the guy with the coat and half his legs gone). I gotta say - I ain't proud of this one.

I like to do digital art and I've gotten pretty good at it over the years, but pixel art is a pain to do and I don't have the skills or the know-how to do it right.

What I like to see in this thread is your methods for creating sprites in DOOM, I could use some guidance on this matter.

[HQDefault]

This honestly doesn't even look bad.

 

Try making the skin tone a bit darker and smoothing out the shading some more. Try and reduce the hardness of the outlines. I think that should help it look just a bit more doom-y

[P41R47]

For certain its retty cool.
Just go on with it, pal!
You already has what it needs to make good things.

Maybe some feedback after your releases will help you get even better ;)

[Ar_e_en]

Noted.

Unfortunately I already added this sprite to my wad and I'm too lazy to fix and replace all the textures again, but for future projects this could come in handy. Also, I made a texture replacement for the WOLF9 texture, which I intend to use as a waterfall texture!

It is basically a slightly modified BFALL texture that I colored blue and added specific highlights to certain spots. I find it weird that (unless I'm mistaken or just blind when I scroll through the texture list) DOOM2 doesn't have a waterfall texture, you'd think that for map visuals that would be obvious, but I guess the id guys didn't think so.

 

Blood and Slime falls? Makes total sense!

Water? Nah! Nobody would get any mileage out of that!

[Ar_e_en]

I've actually made 3 maps now, I'll make a final 4th one and then package them into one .wad file. If all goes to plan, the map should be Boom compatible with one new texture, one new decoration and one new DeHacked enemy!

[Doomkid]

If you rip WFALL textures right out of Plutonia and slap them in a Doom2 wad, they’ll animate with no extra fooling around necessary. I guess they just never used the texture in any of the maps and decided to strip it before release.

[Ar_e_en]

Oh yeah, Plutonia had waterfalls! I guess the two brothers actually thought that waterfalls might be useful.

[Ar_e_en]

Here's another attempt: A simple street lamp (replaces the red fire torch). I think this one's a bit better than my hanging corpse.

 

    

[Ar_e_en]

Made a slight update to the lamp.

 

[Argenteo]

Like that lamp. I don't want spoilers but could you put that lamp in some scene?

[Ar_e_en]

Technically - this kinda is spoilers from a map I'm working on - but it's not from anything special in the current map (but I will add a spoiler tag just in case!).

Spoiler

 

This picture also contains a custom sky texture I made.

 

Spoiler

 

[P41R47]

Really good spriting and texturing, pal!
Keep at it!

Those street lamps are really sexy!

;)

[Ar_e_en]

One thing that I'm not a fan of is the fact that the sky texture is a bit too small (I think it loops like 4 times in a map). I would like the sky texture to be horizontally bigger, but I guess that's only possible for Zdoom derivative engines and not Boom derivative ones. Oh well... 

[Stigs]

Maybe you could scale the image up in an image program, maybe paint or paint.net? If you use paint.net make sure you set the quality to nearest neighbor.

 

[Ar_e_en]

Vertically the sky texture is fine, my problem is that I don't think that a Boom compatible port will accept a sky texture that's bigger (or even smaller) in any direction (vertically or horizontally).

[Argenteo]

Looks very cool! 

[Scypek2]

12 hours ago, Ar_e_en said:

Vertically the sky texture is fine, my problem is that I don't think that a Boom compatible port will accept a sky texture that's bigger (or even smaller) in any direction (vertically or horizontally).

 

Actually, even vanilla can have longer sky textures! The only limitation is that texture patches can't be wider than 256 pixels, so if you want a 1024px wide sky texture (360 degrees), you have to make it out of four 256x128 patches.

[P41R47]

13 hours ago, Ar_e_en said:

Vertically the sky texture is fine, my problem is that I don't think that a Boom compatible port will accept a sky texture that's bigger (or even smaller) in any direction (vertically or horizontally).

Yeah, take a look at tnt.wad or plutonia.wad.

both have 4 patches long custom skies.

:)

[Ar_e_en]

Okay, so I took a look at Plutonia and you are correct! There are sky textures with A,B,C,D labels at the ends. But now this brings up a new problem - if I wanted longer skies in my wad, would I have to use Plutonia as an Iwad? Remember - I want to make my maps in the Boom format with DOOM 2 as the Iwad and DOOM 2 doesn't have these long separated "ABCD" skies, it has skies that are called something along the lines of "RSKY1", not "RSKY1A" (or B or C or D). 

 

Tho, I also noticed that Plutonia has one regular length sky texture for the first few maps.

[P41R47]

4 hours ago, Ar_e_en said:

Okay, so I took a look at Plutonia and you are correct! There are sky textures with A,B,C,D labels at the ends. But now this brings up a new problem - if I wanted longer skies in my wad, would I have to use Plutonia as an Iwad? Remember - I want to make my maps in the Boom format with DOOM 2 as the Iwad and DOOM 2 doesn't have these long separated "ABCD" skies, it has skies that are called something along the lines of "RSKY1", not "RSKY1A" (or B or C or D). 

 

Tho, I also noticed that Plutonia has one regular length sky texture for the first few maps.

Nope, you can use four side skies on every Doom IWAD. You only need to add the patches to the PNAMES lump first, and then open the TEXTURES1 or 2 and search for the SKY1, SKY2 or SKY3 entry, select it, edit it size from 256 to 1024 and thats it, select the patches for every side, manually adjust them if needed, and you are way to go.

It doesn't matter the format, you can do this on vanilla, limit removing, boom or zdoom.

[Doomkid]

Put simply, textures can be 1024 wide, but patches can only be 256. Weird, I know! Thankfully, modifying the sky texture to make it 1024 wide is trivial now.

[Ar_e_en]

7 hours ago, P41R47 said:

Nope, you can use four side skies on every Doom IWAD. You only need to add the patches to the PNAMES lump first, and then open the TEXTURES1 or 2 and search for the SKY1, SKY2 or SKY3 entry, select it, edit it size from 256 to 1024 and thats it, select the patches for every side, manually adjust them if needed, and you are way to go.

It doesn't matter the format, you can do this on vanilla, limit removing, boom or zdoom.

Interesting, I'm gonna go experiment with this.

 

7 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Put simply, textures can be 1024 wide, but patches can only be 256. Weird, I know! Thankfully, modifying the sky texture to make it 1024 wide is trivial now.

Hmm... You know, this sounds like the perfect topic for a tutorial *wink* *wink*

[Ar_e_en]

Welp I tried, but no success (granted I was just winging it).

When I load the map - only the original RSKY1 appears. I'm clearly doing something wrong.

 

[Doomkid]

I think this all should work if you rename that texture to SKY1 instead of RSKY1, and scroll up a bit and rename the original SKY1 texture to something else (Doom gets confused by having two textures with the same name but otherwise what you’ve done looks correct) 

[Ar_e_en]

45 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I think this all should work if you rename that texture to SKY1 instead of RSKY1, and scroll up a bit and rename the original SKY1 texture to something else (Doom gets confused by having two textures with the same name but otherwise what you’ve done looks correct) 

 

I renamed the old SKY1 to OLDSKY1 and renamed RSKY1 to SKY1. 

Now it WORKS! Thanks again Doomkid!

 

 

 

Everything is backwards for some reason, but honestly - that's not a big deal.

 

 

[Gez]

Yes, sky textures are projected mirrored.

 

Textures can be even longer than 1024, but that's pointless for sky textures since 1024 texels do a full loop. Anything after that would be cut out of the sky. AFAIK The Unholy Trinity was one of the first, if not the first, to use the full-wraparound sky method. At least I remember it came with a text file that explained how to make a non-tiled sky.

 

RSKY* are the names of the patches used to create the sky textures in Doom II. It's important to remember that patch names and texture names are two different notions for the engine. Even if people commonly make textures named after the single patch they use; in the original IWAD it's not the case. As far as the engine is concerned, what matters is the texture name. Doom II sky textures are still named SKY1, SKY2, SKY3.

[Ar_e_en]

Welp, I made a new sprite and a new texture.

A candy bar and a locked convenience store shelf-fridge-hybrid-thingy (made by combining the bookshelf texture with that shinny metal texture).

 

 

I'm still wondering if there are better methods to creating these textures and sprites. My method for creating all these is to create something on a larger canvas (say: if my desired thing is 40x40, then I make it as 400x400 or 200x200 or something bigger). Once I've made the big object - I scale it down and apply the standard DOOM color palette. From there - I just tweak it a bit. If there is a better method - let me know.