creating new sprites

[cokeman118]

Hello,

This is my first post here, I hope you guys can help me out. It has been a while since I have modded with Doom, and with all of the source ports out now that enable you to do different things it has been interesting. I've had an idea I wanted to do for a long time, I'd like to make it a reality. The only problem I'm facing right now is sprite creation.

What I would like to do is create many new custom monsters from scratch, including all the sprite animations. I tried to make a test sprite to get an idea of what it would look like... let's just say it wasn't pretty.

Instead of hand drawing or doing "pixel drawing" which I cannot do anyway, I decided to take a digital photo of an object, and manipulate it with a graphics program. Photoshop in this case. Anyway, I took my high res photo and scaled it down to the same size as the Marine sprite image in doom. I wanted to keep it the same hight as a "human" character. This made my image look like crap and pretty much unrecognizable. It had major pixelation, which I understand, but the original Doom Marine looked better! I save it as a bit map file, not sure if this makes a difference, since the doom sprites are bit map.

How can I scale my original photo down to the doom pixel size, and retain most of the detail?? Is it possible to make a sprite larger than the doom sprites? I think I read that doom will scale them down anyway. What about high res sprites? Wouldn't they be larger (lenght/width) compared to original doom sprites??

Not to get too technical with the graphics program, but I took my object, removed the background and saved the object by itself. I then took the ojbect and scaled it down to the same dimensions as the doom marine, and created a new layer. Even thought the dimensions were the same, my photo seemed larger but had pretty good detail. Since it was bigger, I rescaled the canvas, as it was bigger than the Marine. This is where it looked like crap.. I didn't realize that the doom sprites were so small.

I'm getting discouraged with making these sprites, as taking the photos of the objects I want to use seems to be the best way of getting them in game.

Does anyone have any suggestions to help me out with this, so my sprites look somewhat descent?? Am I manipulating these wrong?

Thanks..

[myk]

If you're going to depend on an engine with enhanced features for your mod (your post seems to imply this), you might want use one that supports internal sprite scaling. It will make the pixels of the sprite smaller in the game, so the sprite will be of the desired size but more detailed.

Other than that, what might help is trying different image manipulating programs, since some scale things better than others. You'll still have to edit things manually, though, since nothing scales perfectly to a very small scale.

[Kappes Buur]

This may be helpful:

http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13992&p=284700

[cokeman118]

I'm currently looking into Edge and Zdoom. I've also found a sprite editor called Pro Motion I think I'll try.

So with that said I have another sprite question. I'm not sure I fully understand how to add a new custom sprite to a WAD. Do I have to use an existing sprite name and just change the graphic, or can I create an entirely new sprite, including a new name? It's been a while since I used WinTex but I have used it to make new textures, and if I remember correctly I was able to make a new name, but I think I had to use an existing texture. This seems to be the most confusing for me right now, as there really isn't a specific example that I can use. If anyone knows, please let me know. Yes I'm somewhat of a newb with this, but with all of these sourceports around that didn't exist when I was editing with DCK back when you had to use DOS, I'm trying to get familiar with the newer commands.

I tried a while back to use some of the 3D floors and couldn't figure it out. I even tried to "reverse engineer" some WADS that used them, but still couldn't figure out all of the parameters. I stopped with editing for a while because of this...seemed like there was little documentation for the "newb" to understand.. Edge seems right now the easiest to make floors with.

[cokeman118]

Kappes Buur said:

This may be helpful:

http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13992&p=284700

Cool, this is exactly what I'm looking for. I'll read through it and try it out. Not too keen on trying to draw the stuff though... If all else fails I may try it.