Making sprites based on real life drawings.

[Rajerel]

Hello world,

I'm starting to get my hands on making Doom sprites in a semi-cartoon style, and the way I've tried to do this, was to make a real life concept drawing, which I'd then polish up and give it matching colors to Doom's 256 color palette, and then trying to translate the drawing into a pixel art version (Made in Paint), the sprites themselves are made from scratch, with the actual drawing being used for reference, but now that I think about it, it may not be the best method, so I need the help of you, the viewer, to figure out the best method to make sprites, that are based on real drawings, and THEN, making animations out of the sprite, that's made out of the drawing, I know it's kind of confusing, but I can't find another way to put it.

Thank you.

[ReX]

From what I know, there is no good alternative to making sprites the way you're describing. You need to create rotations of each animation frame, with 8 rotations per frame being optimal. Of course, you can create more rotations (e.g., 16) so that the animation will be smoother, but that also means more art work. This needs to be done for idle, wake, attack, and death states.

 

The process can be streamlined a bit for symmetric frames in actors (e.g., SARGA2A8 for the demon's walking animation), whereby you can skip the artwork for a few frames.

 

The way id Software created their enemy sprites was to first sculpt models, which they then photographed, imported the images into a computer, and digitally altered the images. Read more about it on the Wiki. Naturally, the typical sprite artist wouldn't want to use this approach.

[Rajerel]

3 hours ago, ReX said:

From what I know, there is no good alternative to making sprites the way you're describing. You need to create rotations of each animation frame, with 8 rotations per frame being optimal. Of course, you can create more rotations (e.g., 16) so that the animation will be smoother, but that also means more art work. This needs to be done for idle, wake, attack, and death states.

 

The process can be streamlined a bit for symmetric frames in actors (e.g., SARGA2A8 for the demon's walking animation), whereby you can skip the artwork for a few frames.

 

The way id Software created their enemy sprites was to first sculpt models, which they then photographed, imported the images into a computer, and digitally altered the images. Read more about it on the Wiki. Naturally, the typical sprite artist wouldn't want to use this approach.

Hmm, interesting, I could try that method, thanks a lot.

[Gez]

Note that nowadays many people can make virtual models and then turn them into sprites. Sprite artists such as @Nmn and @Amuscaria do that. Amuscaria used to go the draw->scan->clean-up route for sprites and created a few tutorials about that process, like this one, unfortunately the images died because imageshack sucks.

 

[Rajerel]

14 minutes ago, Gez said:

Amuscaria used to go the draw->scan->clean-up route for sprites 

 

I'm trying this method right now, I tried using sculpturing, but it didn't really worked out for me to be honest.

[ReX]

7 hours ago, Gez said:

Note that nowadays many people can make virtual models and then turn them into sprites.

Yes, of course. I had completely forgotten about this option. L'il White Mouse had used this method when creating Star Wars: Chibi Rebellion

[Kappes Buur]

On 10/3/2020 at 10:31 AM, Gez said:

....., like this one, unfortunately the images died because imageshack sucks.

 

Amuscaria (formerly known as Eriance) had made a number of spriting tutorials and sprites, culminating in Hell-Forged

[Gez]

I know?