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wesleyjohnson

Update to Spider Demon

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Have all the animations done. It has a death sequence.

Calculating out the view height correctly has changed the appearance.
The view-height is 41 units.
The gun barrel is 59 units high.
The spider is 100 units high at the highest tentacle.
Even at a view distance of 700 units, the player is looking up at most of the monster, which does make it look larger (as it should).

Am now fighting with the color conversions. It looks great in PNG, but the final patch has issues.
- Misfit does not provide an controls for setting camera position, so I am having
to set up some method of positioning the camera consistently. The appearance changes
considerably with distance because it is a true 3D model. I am going to choose a player viewpoint between 500 and 700 units away from the spider (180 units across).
- Misfit alters the colors of the textures applied to the skin. Even if Doom palette colors are used on the skin, it is difficult to get them into the frame PNG unaltered.
- The color quantizer is behaving better than before, but it still does not know to
preserve a color splash rather than choose another pixel color from the Doom palette.
The tentacle color, stains, and other painted details are getting mangled and lost.
It has a tendency to change the edges of color splashes to grays and browns, because the palette does not have an appropriate color of the right intensity, in spite of specific color preservation settings in the quantizer. The Doom palette lacks greenish-gray, so it goes all the way to clear gray.
- Misfit only puts out a 4M PNG (wrong size), and it uses a different background color, which cannot be changed in Misfit. Must use GIMP on every frame to change the background color to the Doom CYAN, and rescale to the 100..106 pixels high range.
- I found that GIMP was the cause of fuzziness in the final rendering.
The rescaling uses cubic interpolation. The other interpolations are worse. The interpolation must reach out beyond the boundaries of the one pixel to smooth the pixel transitions. It certainly blurs all the sharp edges.
I only get sharp PNG out if I turn off the interpolation entirely, but I do not know if that is sampling a single point, or averaging colors. I would do more experiments but I don't see any alternative, I have only one workable setting.

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The PRELIMINARY Spider Demon Mastermind V8.0 pwad.

The link or URL you must send to the recipient(s) of your file(s) is:
http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=gbceb2e4f56d2be149997224408a2202991a8cca75

The file(s) that can be retrieved with the above link is:

spid_v80.wad (1.038 MB)

The file(s) will be available on the server for the next 10 days.


Generated from Misfit 3d model.
Has been hand edited, using GIMP, in PNG format, to add gun flash, ammo burn, hilight, and death toning.

Has not had its pnm format hand editing yet.
Has not been display position adjusted yet (all frames display at 128,100 for now.

Question:
I have all the 1-8 views for the entire death sequence. They are nearly free when
generating from a 3d model. I already added the ammo burn editing to them.
* They will increase the size of the wad (probably to around 2.5MB, it has a long death sequence).
* They may not get seen often.
* You get to see the spider demon thrash to death from different angles.
Comments on adding all view angles for the death sequence ?

Question:
I want to add all angles for the final dead body. This can be walked around.
Any problem with that ??

Question:
During testing, I have not seen the PAIN frame used.
Anyone know if the spider demon PAIN is under-utilized.
(I have not looked at the code yet myself).

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i really like the updates to the design, it reminds me of the elder things, and how inhuman it looks now is a plus i think. but the corpse is way too tall, almost as tall as the living monster

also shading is a bit flat, but other than that i like it :)

about corpse and death sequence rotation, it is something i have wanted to suggest too, although it is going to be challenging to add them to all monsters. still worth giving it a try i think

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Shading was done by Misfit model, which does NOT have lighting control.
It only varies shading based on view angle. It does not generate shadows. All the shadows seen were hand drawn on the textures given to Misfit Model.
Even with that, the PNG version looks very reasonable.
The conversion to the Doom palette then killed most of lighting effects.

Blender is much more capable.

The tentacle waving and leg movement is all handled by Misfit model.
That it handled rather well. Only the power piston joint required hand adjustment afterwards (the silver rod sliding into the green cylinder).

On the previous version, I had the power box explode and burn to melt the monster down
flat. It does not feel right for that much bulk to just disappear into giblets.
The huge fire required did not render well. The fire rendered as a white cloud that looked like some kind rendering mistake.
So this time, no big fire, and I am leaving a full-sized monster corpse. That way the play can walk up to it after it is dead, and experience how big it is. The corpse size does match the physical size of the live monster (100 high). You have just never seen one close up before.

He did sag a little, and lists a bit to the side. The dead corpse has faded skin color. I could make it darker, but that would require hours of more hand shading on the PNG frames.

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Death frame should be about 1/3 of that size. Can cut off the head and put it in front, then make it more broken looking to reduce size even more. The death frame is the most important frame of the monster.

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Cutting off the head, or any similar idea, would require an entirely different death sequence. Worse, I could not use the Misfit model joint movements to execute such a change. A separate model would have to be created with the head off. The death sequence is more than half the modeling work.

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i think the death has to change, because the massive corpse obstructs player vision, perhaps the original death could be edited to match the new sprites

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The only problem I have seen is that other monsters ignore the corpse and will walk through it. I had a revenant come at me through the spider demon corpse.

However, I know of only one map where that is even possible. Almost every map with a spider demon has it as the boss monster, last to be killed. There is little fighting after it is dead.

The three possibilities are incompatible:
1. Interest: A full size corpse is very interesting, and worth walking around.
It is the only chance of getting up close and experiencing the size of the spider demon. The shooting pushes the player away otherwise.
Having all 8 views of a huge corpse would be interesting. The smaller the corpse gets the less interesting it is.
2. Physics: Most engines do not have solid corpses. The player and monsters can walk through them. DoomLegacy has solid corpses (optional), but I do not take its corpse size as any standard.
3. Playable: A few times other monsters may walk through the corpse. Missiles will pass right through. If there is going to be much fighting around dead spider demons, this will be a problem.
4. View: A large corpse blocks the view. Of what?. How difficult is it to walk to the side and look around. The corpse will have to be less than 40 high to see over it.
5. Usage: most maps have the spider demon as the last final monster. All other monsters will be killed before it is encountered. It is rarely even in the same room with other monsters. It can get stuck to them because the size exceeds what the engine checks for collision.
6. Importance: A full size corpse may have some importance because it is visually interesting. Reduced size and flat monsters are not important at all. The engine ignores them, the players ignore them. When the spider demon is killed the level is over anyway, so the spider demon corpse is not going to have much play interaction importance, except if it interferes with ongoing battles.
7. Size: The spider demon is huge, but it is hard to see this because there is only one set of sprites and the player has no depth perception.
A full size corpse is one of the few times the player can ever see how big the spider demon was. The player cannot get close to it when it is alive.
8. 8 views: It is only worth doing if the corpse is going to be interesting. If it is reduced blob, then why bother. Having 8 views would stop the blob from spinning on the ground. Only the players with some sense of "realism" would care, I suppose the game-boy style players would find little symbol like a grave marker acceptable (like some other games did).
9. Legs and metal parts. Each leg is as large as a player. The top of a leg is at player eye level. If the legs stay on the corpse, it is going to be a huge corpse with all the large corpse problems. To make a small corpse, all that metal has to disappear. What explanation can there be for massive metal legs disappearing.
10. Heights:
Spider Demon topmost height: 106 units
Spider Demon physical height: 100 units
Spider Demon gun height: 58 units
Spider Demon top of leg: varying, 40 to 50 units
Player height: 56 units
Player eye height: 41 units
Corpse height: 10 units or less, cacodemon might be 15 units high

Solutions:

Full size corpse: 95 units high.
Interesting. Impressive size. Worth having 8 views.
Has the fewest problems with credibility. Needs no explanations.
The problem with monsters walking through the corpse can be ducked if the player simply moves to the side.

1/3 size corpse: 30 units high.
Not much interesting in a corpse that is so distorted and collapsed.
Monsters will still walk through it, so that problem is not solved.
Legs are too large (50 units high) for this corpse, strange things must happen to them too.
Keeps most of the problems, does not solve anything, and introduces new credibility problems.
Can look over the corpse to see other monsters coming. Just looking over it was not a big problem, unless you were trying to see monsters that are about to walk through the corpse, which is the real problem.

1/4 size corpse: 25 units high.
Even less interesting to view.
Nothing special to look at.
Where all the monster bulk has gone is not representable in one frame. Barely small enough that a monster can walk over (climb over) without appearing that it walked through a ghost.
The legs are way too big for this corpse size, so they must disappear too (Evaporating metal?).
Still has most of the same problems of large corpse, and introduces new problems.

Flat corpse: Not very interesting. A placeholder for where the spider demon died. Other monsters do not have more than the one corpse view because a blob on the ground can look the same from any angle. Not worth having all 8 views.
Most of the spider demon bulk just disappears, no credible explanation is possible.
No problem with Monsters walking over the flat corpse.

The Flat Corpse is the most compatible solution with the limitations of the engine, the low importance of the corpse, and what has been done with the other monster corpses.
This is the only solution that solves the problems, but it gives up everything that was interesting to do it. Has credibility problems. Not very satisfying for all the work it involves.

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wesleyjohnson said:

nonsense


below is an animatic done by arborix that shows a possible death sequence that is far more player friendly, basically the elder thing portion cuts off from the base and topples forward

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This is version 8.2 of the Spider Demon.
The FULL version has all rotations for the entire death sequence, and a large corpse.
The ABV version has one rotation for the death sequence, and a abbreviated corpse.

The link or URL you must send to the recipient(s) of your file(s) is:
http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=g2df20ce7d2b2749e999734964b897d6e974d4116e

The file(s) that can be retrieved with the above link is (are):

spid_v8_2_abv.zip (469.469 KB)
spid_v8_2_full.zip (808.297 KB)

The file(s) will be available on the server for the next 10 days.

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So, after someone spends months making a sprite you feel entitled to change anything you don't like to your style of drawing, or direction. Did someone make this guy director of FreeDoom sprites or something.

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don't be ridiculous, i'm only talking about making the death sequence somewhat smoother and doing some edits to the shading that you admitted was screwed over by the palletization. i dont see why you antogonize me so much when i'm one of the few people here that are actually supportive of your design. dont forget that as an open content project freedoom can aspire to continously improve, that means it will continue to change. the edits i want to do are no different from when you edited the leileilol gargoyle, and i very much doubt he bitched about that. your of course welcome to improve the death sequence and shading yourself, i was just under the impression you would be unwilling to so considering your usual behaviour

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Catoptromancy said:

Yeah. New design is order of magnitude more menacing. Although adding some rusty texture to the legs and tower could improve it Silent Hill wise. Maybe even something like rusty chainsaw blades attached to the legs. Like with the skull above.

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