marky Posted August 27, 2004 Hi all! I'm still working on my TC. Basically, the fist map is ready. But what isn't satisfying at all are some monster sprites. I'm sitting there, staring on my Photoshop and am just stunned by the simplicity and complexity of the original sprites. How could the ID guys make THAT convincing sprites with THAT low resolution? It's a secret I don't understand. They only had a few pixels and they managed to draw impressive muscles and shadows. Look at the legs of the Arachnotron! A hole universe of shadows and metallic reflexions with only 5 pixels of width. And, what is even more, they only used 256 colors for it! Well, I'm not a graphic artist, that may be the main problem. But I imagine, there must be some tricks to make convincing sprites. You can't draw a sprite pixel by pixel. That would take a year for each monster! Did you ever make completely new sprites? How did you manage to make them convincing and lively? marky 0 Share this post Link to post
Terra-jin Posted August 27, 2004 id used clay models for the monsters. I think they just took photos of the models, scanned them, and cropped them into DOOM-sized sprites. 0 Share this post Link to post
Deathmatcher Posted August 27, 2004 Yes, Carmack wrote a program he called "Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop" with which the artists could easily manipulate scanned images and convert them to the Doom format. 0 Share this post Link to post
Nmn Posted August 27, 2004 marky said:You can't draw a sprite pixel by pixel. That would take a year for each monster! Did you ever make completely new sprites? How did you manage to make them convincing and lively? Yes You can. Pixel-Artists make that, and Yeah I find really hard to imagine. An alternative way of doing sprites is to make them large (let's say 128x128-farily large) make them, and then scale them (use bicubic resampling, or bilinears, never pixel scale!). There's another way-3d softwarez, You get a modelling program and make the model, then photograph it from different angles to make the sprite. I believe that the combination of both (3d modelling and Paint Program retuning) is the best method. 0 Share this post Link to post
marky Posted August 27, 2004 hmmmm... ok.... and how do WE do it? (Btw, I'm not the only one with this complexes, I think. Most monster conversions take the original sprites and change colors. The only really good TC with completely new monsters I've seen so far is osiris.wad.) 0 Share this post Link to post
Nmn Posted August 27, 2004 do what? b more specific, thx. Osiris? What about D64tc? Hacx? WolfenDoom? 0 Share this post Link to post
marky Posted August 27, 2004 sorry, I posted my last reply while you were writing yours. :-) I replied to the first two posts, who mentioned clay models and special Doom-3d-modelling-programms. That's nothing that I can do. Ok, with a 3D-Programm it could work. Have to find one. 0 Share this post Link to post
marky Posted August 27, 2004 *LOL* just found it on my own. But your post shows me, that it seems to be good choice. Thanks! 0 Share this post Link to post
Nmn Posted August 27, 2004 Good luck in learning it. You WILL need it :) 0 Share this post Link to post
Deathmatcher Posted August 27, 2004 Nmn said:An alternative way of doing sprites is to make them large (let's say 128x128-farily large) make them, and then scale them (use bicubic resampling, or bilinears, never pixel scale!). Interesting, how do I do this bicubic resampling? Can it be done with Paint Shop Pro? (If yes, how?) 0 Share this post Link to post
Nmn Posted August 28, 2004 Ofcourse, I use PSP all the time. Shift+S = scale. Mess with scaling parameters-there are 4-smart size, bilinear, bicubic and pixel (the last one is teh evil IMO). 0 Share this post Link to post
Scuba Steve Posted August 28, 2004 Yes, it's actually a skill that people develop to try and draw the most ammount of detail in the smallest available space. A good example is SNES RPGs like Breath of Fire and FF6. The characters are all no more than 32 pixels tall and yet are full of life. The monsters in Doom were 3D models, photographed, and scaled and painted on the computer. You can see touch up work done by hand on most monsters... like the Faces. Detail would be lost, so someone had to go in and redraw the faces with as few pixels as possible, to maintain as much detail as possible. 0 Share this post Link to post
marky Posted August 28, 2004 Yes. it's an art and it's a time-consuming art. Now I tried to work with this 3D-Programm, but that's only twice complicated. I love Doom and Editing, but it's not worth all the time you need to learn to work with these programs. And when you have cool monster sprites you still have no map and gameplay... Are there guys out there who are specialized on sprite editing for Doom? Perhaps someone has a cool black fly sprite? That's what I wanted to do. marky 0 Share this post Link to post
deathbringer Posted August 30, 2004 I've been drawing some pretty good human sprites for doom, well they arent amazing but they have faces, and primitive shading and shadows, they will be mostly in a wad i'm working on called Zombie shock massacre. So far there is a general 'jeans and t-shirt' zombie, which will have a lot of colour variations. A Traffic warden zombie, and one of my mate Lina, which is small. I'll eventally need to make sprites of deformed crawling people, and people that have been integrated into a disgustign biological 'machine', which will be harder to do. Also i'll need to make some cars like the GBD2 ones, except based on real ones, that will probably be hard, but i might make them 'double resolution', then scale them down in-engine. I'm not looking forward to drawing a Vauxhall Cresta, thats a very complicated looking car... 0 Share this post Link to post
Scuba Steve Posted August 30, 2004 deathbringer said:Also i'll need to make some cars like the GBD2 ones... ...which are the ones from Batman Doom... 0 Share this post Link to post
Use Posted August 30, 2004 I love pixel art, I think sprite artists are a dying breed. 0 Share this post Link to post
Nmn Posted August 31, 2004 Are You kidding? There's a whole lively community of them: http://web1.t43.greatnet.de/ Props to Scuba for link :) 0 Share this post Link to post
Graf Zahl Posted August 31, 2004 Use3D said:I love pixel art, I think sprite artists are a dying breed. Ugh... If that were true I'd be out of work because I wouldn't get any graphics for the cell phone games I'm developing anymore. The world of games doesn't consist solely of high end 3D games and sprite artists are still needed very much. But it is definitely true that may graphics artists can't do it properly. 0 Share this post Link to post
deathbringer Posted August 31, 2004 ...which are the ones from Batman Doom... ...except the ghostbuster's car... 0 Share this post Link to post
marky Posted September 18, 2004 Well... 3 weeks have passed since I started this thread. I worked on and now I'm quite satisfied with the results. Once you get used to draw your sprites pixel by pixel, you can come to good results. As an appetizer for the wad I'm working on, and to show you the results, I post two screenshots of new monsters I've made. Let me know your opinion... The Phobetor The Hellbuck I hope to finish the first two maps of Biovite.wad in a few weeks. Marky/ Milian 0 Share this post Link to post
Erik Posted September 18, 2004 Those monsters don't look half bad, good job. 0 Share this post Link to post
Nmn Posted September 18, 2004 Pixel by pixel in 3 weeks? Great achievement. The sprites look decent, looking forward to seing the TC. 0 Share this post Link to post
Scuba Steve Posted September 18, 2004 Nmn said:Pixel by pixel in 3 weeks? Well.. the first one clearly isn't, but the second one is a modified imp sprite, so yes, it probably was. 0 Share this post Link to post
Nmn Posted September 18, 2004 Lol I meant he learned to follow "the way of the pixel" in 3 weeks, which is pretty good, concerning he gave up some time ago, not that he made the sprites in 3 weeks :P 0 Share this post Link to post
marky Posted September 18, 2004 Oh, sorry, I didn't want to show off... of course I didn't make these sprites from zero. The Hellbuck was an imp, but I worked on it the pixel way. And for the Phobetor I had an image from the net, but only from one view. So I had to draw the other views from this pic and this was really pixel work. As to the 3D-modeling: I tried to cope with Blender, but that is much too complex if you only do it for Doom sprites. However, a friend of mine is really interested in 3D modeling and I passed it on to him. Now he works fine with this program and I'm looking forward to the first 3D model I can add into my wad... 0 Share this post Link to post
kristus Posted September 18, 2004 I've been doing alot of sprite work in my years of dooming. Both pixel-artist and 3d artist. I am quite fed up with pixel art by now.. So I don't do doom sprites anymore. 0 Share this post Link to post