The MARBFACE Textures

Enjay said:

A gargoyle. STONGARG, WOODGARG. Some sort of horned, satyry-looking gargoyle I suspect.

I love that face, and the satyr face on the switches/green marble that looks like Louis de Funès - they're weird since Doom's demons don't really have human faces, but for me it makes them more sinister/unnerving than demon face textures. I know the gargoyle in particular is considered funny by many people (at least I seem to have gotten such an impression somehow?), but I always found it a bit chilling, in small doses of course (so not like those areas in E2M4 for instance).

Gez said:

Which are crumbling and have lost many parts already. Yep. Clay figures are frail and don't age very well.

Shit, they were falling apart even at the time. Clay doesn't take well to being adjusted multiple times for action poses. That's why they went with (wire-reinforced?) latex models for the retail sequel.

Avoozl said:

I so wish they would make hi res sprites out of those original models, but that's not likely to ever happen anytime soon, it would've made a great surprise for the already passed 20th if it were done.

Well, I don't think that would be worth it. They did a lot of cut and paste and 2d painterly touch-up on the scanned images, far beyond simply colorizing the original B&W sprites. Like, the zombieman and sargeant are pretty clear edits of the original Marine sprite, with new heads and decoration -- compare the run/walk animations, and hence why their rifles/shotgun all have pretty much the same profile. The cut and pasting is especially apparent in the gibbed animations, and deaths like the Baron's -- check out how the ground-level pile seems to move up towards stationary gibs in the air, rather than vice versa, in a resource viewer like NWT that orients all sprites from the top/center.

My point, in other words, is that straight-up re-digitization wouldn't be enough; it'd take a lot of artist man-hours to touch up the original models to their in-game sprites' final appearances. Two of the most direct model->sprite conversions were the Cyberdemon and the Marine, and they were each in colorless gray clay.

Buuut...

its obvious that one is the arch-vile, the other is the baron of hell/hell knight, and one is the icon of sin.