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wesleyjohnson

Update to Spider Demon

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I am going to start on some revising of My SpiderDemon.
It was done with Gimp and I had always planned on an improved version using a 3d model. Now I have Blender installed and will be doing some Blasphemer sprites (among all the other projects I have going simultaneously).

The issues to be addressed:
- Limitations in my talent with shadowing and color in Gimp. Blender will render with shadows and all 3d artifacts.
- Improved legs. They were constructed of 3 parts in Gimp. The
Blender model will be able to have more details. Have ideas for a lighter, longer legs, with more parts.
- The appearance of SCALE. The current Spider Demon does not show well how big it is. Will be adding details to give it a sense of hugeness.
This will be an experiment, but I will put scaled catwalks (for imps) on it if I have too. It needs a recognizable construct on it that provides some reference to the size of the whole SpiderDemon.
The current chaingun may be the wrong scale too.
- Will keep the style to be compatible with the FreeDoom Imp and pinky design. Kind of a swamp creature. Not a shiny, plastic look.

The issue may force some serious rescaling of the rest of it, but the construction of a 3d model forces such re-modeling anyway.

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Yes, I got started. Spent most early time figuring out exactly what I want to modify and how, so as to remove a few iterations of rework.

Then got problems with my G96 monitor failing, upgrading my video-card
and having the NVidia proprietary drivers not working.

The G96 monitor is limping along with a distorted screen. I can write code on it even though the text at the right hand side is squashed.
Graphics work may be affected.
To fix it, I have a 16 Amp FET included in my next order, which was on hold because of customer work.
I cannot find a reasonable replacement monitor.

I am limping along using the wrong NVidia drivers, that seem to work better than the right NVidia drivers. Need to switch to Nouveau drivers, but that does not seem to work at all and I cannot figure out why.

I have to figure out how to use this new 3d drawing program. Spent time reading some of the manuals. Trying to figure the easiest way to get the current work into the new editor.

The spider demon will look significantly different.
The flailing war hammer may go, because it looks too cyclic.
Bigger legs.
Something to indicate its relative size, like hanging a few dead bodies on the side ? Maybe the walkway idea ?

Maybe by the end of March, I will have more progress.

I am currently deep into reworking the network code of DoomLegacy and prefer to finish that immediate task first.

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Ordered the part to fix my monitor, the G96, an IBM CRT graphics monitor.

Using a program named mm3d (can't remember the full name). It seemed to be smaller, simpler, and more focused than blender, but is proving to be aggravating in actual usage.

Made a bone frame for the Spider Demon last night. That was the easy part. Very straight forward. Cannot stick a new bone in between existing bones though.

To move the end of a bone, must click to select mode. My habits with GIMP lead me to try to grab the selected item and drag it, and that does not work with mm3d. Must switch to MOVE mode to move something.
This is true for vertexes also.

It keeps putting vertexes where they are hard to select and move.
Moving vertexes gets to be a major problem. With only front, left and top views, the vertexes line up with each other, and I cannot select the one I want independently. Somehow two vertexes got too close together and there was absolutely no way to grab one independently. I had to undo that whole structure and start it over.

Took me hours to make one box and to texture one side of it.
Had to make a material in order to introduce a texture to the program.
Made the box a group to put a texture on the box, but each side of the box needs to be a separate texture.

Fought with the texture coordinates for hours. You can select vetexes and drag them around the texture, but in the perspective nothing has changed. Closing and reopening the texture coordinate window appears to reset the texture coordinates. Finally got them to stay set, and I do not know what I am doing different.

Trying to texture more than one triangle at the same time has not worked. Don't know if it is supposed to work, or how.

The drawn texture is a blur, and redoing the texture coordinates multiple times did not help. Finally realized that one of the triangles drawn on the texture does not have the vertexes in the same order as when it is display on the canvas. I had to rotate the vertexes around the triangle to straighten out the drawn texture.

There is HELP for all the screens, but it tends to explain everything in its own language, by refering to other operations of the program. It would only make sense if you already knew the program.

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This is progressing again. Had some Doom Legacy work to complete, and some other demands on my time.

Mostly, misfit model is difficult to use.
* If a mesh triangle is split finer, it will leave gaps in the mesh that have to be manually tracked down and closed. If you don't then there are these triangles that are really holes, and they appear identical in the display.
* The mesh is never fine enough to go around curves.
* The SpiderDemon body is all curves.
* The mesh cap holes function has never found any holes to cap.

I think carving it in wood, painting it, and photographing it would be faster.

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i dont think the model has to be perfect. i recall blox at the zdoom forums doing a very messy mesh in zbrush, but when rendered to sprite size it looked fine. if you want i could try to touch up the sprites once you render them

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Or maybe you could, like, improve the current sprite set (or another person up for the task).

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No pics because it is only a rough shape so far. No legs or texture yet.

The point of doing my Spider Demon in Misfit, is to improve on my current version. I wanted to make the legs taller, and orient them better. It needs some recognizable detail to indicate its size. Am considering hanging a door on it as frontal armor so it can be seen how big the Spider demon is compared to the door.

Using a model was to get rid of artistic errors in the drawing, and gain shadowing and color variation. It should have been easier than plotting every detail in 8 directions again.

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Noticed two faces of a mesh that were not showing, so I opened the file with Misfit, flipped the normals around and saved it again. Upon saving this, misfit crashed.
It saved the file first, which misfit will not load, complaining about a bad file.
My next previous backup was several days earlier.
Thinking about switching to Blender but there does not seem to be a path to transfer the misfit work file to a format blender can read.

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Have a naked body, with no legs, and trying to figure how to get texture on it.
Still using Misfit.

Considered using blender.
Read the blender manual for the third time.
Made the mistake of trying the little triangle in the corner of the 3d view.
Now there are four copies of the 3d screen, and I cannot figure out how to turn off the extras. You would think there would be a close window button somewhere, but they all try to open something else.
So back to Misfit.

Spent considerable time fixing a tool that I had been working on so that it could diagnose the Misfit save problem. I turns out that Misfit crashed before writing the file index. I abandoned that file and lost the work, as there is no telling what else it did not write. Now, I ALWAYS save to a new file. Do not let Misfit write over an existing file, as it crashes too easily. Strangely, it has not crashed in the last week, since I started using it again.

Another problem with Misfit. I use a sprite PNG as a background, so I can trace the 3d body. The Left and Right views of Misfit keeping losing the background. But if I switch to 2x2 mode, it finds the background again. Then again, sometimes the background will show up on 2x1 windows too, and then after switching windows a couple of times, it loses it again.

At least, it is the one program that actually brings up a Help manual from the
help menu item. Blender just tries to access the internet and my work computer is
not internet connected.

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It is not presentable, barely got texture on part of it.
Has no legs, and only one eye.
It took a whole afternoon to do that one eye stalk.
The texture I have on it requires much adjustment and shading, it is really flat looking.

It really slows things up that so much of it is 3D. That is why I wanted to make a 3D sprite of it in the first place. Otherwise I have to plot all that 3D into 2D myself.
All the little 3D armor bits have to be created.

Problem is I have other more serious work that needs attending to, so this gets put off for a while.

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More progress, have some leg parts which need to be assembled.
It is going to be an articulated leg with movable parts.
Modeling it in 3d is taking a long time. It will pay off in not having to do the 3d
position calculations for all these parts in 8 views of so many poses.
That and misfit model will draw all the poses with shading, texture, and lighting effects.

Took some time to make my latest version of RSKY2 texture.
The city looks reasonable now. I made new city wall textures with granite patches,
and some solar panels.
The clouds still look wrong. I just cannot get the clouds right.

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It takes a long time to figure out Misfit Model. Until last night, I could not get an animation to work, and animations are the only way to get it to output.
It wants every joint that is moved to be marked as a keyframe. Otherwise if you move two joints it only uses the last position of the last joint you touched, and interpolates the other joints.

Here are some preliminary leg pictures, in PNG.

leg_p1.png

Some more views.
http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=g8894cfeeeb5e0f8a999704621ee92ec81833f1394

http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=gb0dc72d68e310fe299970462250159c45b30bbf99

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for a heavy tall monster wesleys design makes a lot more sense. poiinty legs wouldnt look natural on such a large creature

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raymoohawk said:

for a heavy tall monster wesleys design makes a lot more sense. poiinty legs wouldnt look natural on such a large creature


The thing is that original design was a somewhat comical too. Not that the original Doom arachnotrons were uber serious though.

But one can probably go future and get inspiration from the movie Human Centipede 2.

BTW, here is a little more serious attempt at Doom's spider demon:
http://mechanubis.deviantart.com/art/Let-s-do-Doom-pt-4-Arachnotron-340328974

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lets wait and see what wesley does, hes shown himself to be a capable spriter in the past, and it will be difficult to find someone else whose willing to do a full spiderdemon set

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I have trouble with many of the heavily advertised sites. MediaFire wants me to register, and advertises at me to buy. Others just do not load the file.
Those of you who run Windows 7..10 and have corporate accounts, .. it does not transfer to what I can get to work.

I originally had the leg taller, which looked more menacing, but it would not lift the leg very far. Have to keep it simple because when it gets reduced in size and converted a Doom patch will be hard to see fine detail. When it is one leg among many, it will be hard to see any one leg. So it needs simple visible details.
I may change the leg lift to move the foot outwards some, just to make it more visible that the leg is up, and to give leg motion more visibility from a distance.
There will be some risk that such a leg will be clipped by some wall.

This is going to look similar to the previous spider-demon I did, but using a 3d model program, and a few enhancements. I am still at the stage where I can alter things a bit. I am thinking of swelling the head area to make it "look" more brainy.

I could put more complicated machinery on the power box, like part of a motor sticking out a a hole.

I was thinking of mounting something easily recognizable, like a door, across the front of the spider demon, hung on as armor. It would give some scale to the spider.
Hanging a corpse on the spider would work great but I do not really want to see that.

Have had several other strange ideas that I probably will not do because I really would not want to see that stuff every time I met a spider-demon.

Doing this with a 3d model program will make it much easier to
produce all the angle and pose variations. However, it seems that Misfit Model does not do shadows like bender does.

I had a weird idea of a "Brain-coral spider demon", but it would have had several conceptual problems, among which that brain-coral don't have hands to fire a
machine gun.

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maybe you could rescue the soon to be replace gargoyle, and incorporate a couple of them to the design, as if they where technicians or gun operators aboard the creature or something

also try using imgur, it does not need an account

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Got the legs, eyes, tentacles, and some accessories on the spider. You want tentacles you got tentacles, 12 of them. Looks like a spider-demon-land-bihexopus.
The legs look much better than the previous versions. They splay a little out to the now, which looks more like spider legs (instead of being so up and down).
I did the gatling gun with individual gun barrels so its looks rather realistic. Pity, it wont' render in the final sprite with adequate resolution to show all the detail.

Tried to put some marine armor on it to give it scale, but it does not look right.
It looks like some junk landed on a model and needs to be brushed off.
The spider demon is only 100 high vrs a marine 56 high, so it it not even twice height.
There is not enough room for most ideas like armor, or creatures, or cat-walks.
Putting a door as armor on the front, is big, ungainly, too large, and would look like a door with legs. To get enough door that it is recognizable, I would have to use a large door that is almost as large as the spider demon. Gave up on that.

The only idea I have left is to put a white skull on its head, like a helmet crest decoration. There is just enough room up there, it would be highly visible, should be recognizable, and it would give a sense of scale.

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The skull is a really good idea, not only would it look cool but it'd also tie in with Freedoom 2's final boss. You could try going for a Brainiac's skull ship look:




Or more of a World Painted Blood skull mastermind look:

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Had to drop the skull idea as there was not enough room up there(only 3 pixels).
It already is over 100 high, so I had to bend some tentacles down too.

Had to drop the armor idea.

Changed the footpad to look less like a foot, and more spider pad shaped.

There is plenty of detail already, and the final size reduction to patch size is going to clobber the detail clarity, so simpler may look better anyway.

Got the legs, tentacles, and some accessories ready to animate. This thing has got
22 appendages to adjust with every frame. Those are just the ones with bones in them.

Misfit model has behaved much better that I always save to a new file (currently file version 125). It did crash once again doing that, but it managed to save the file correctly this time.
Going to have some trouble making the views as there is no way to set coordinates of a view position, or angle, or lighting. All I can do is swing the perspective view around and tell it to make all animation PNG.

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Got misfit models for all frames now, with legs, tentacles.
That is 8 legs with 6 joints each, 12 tentacles with 6 to 8 joints each, and eye stalks with 6 joints each, plus a few other things.

Misfit model still has a few new problems to waste time, like twisted limbs, sudden crashes, and the like. But by saving often, it has not lost any files.

Have a few touch ups to do, then shoot the frames into PNG. After that have to
GIMP edit to put in the gun flashes and some ammo explosions in the death sequence.

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