How to create monster sprites?

[DamTheGreat]

I have ideas for a new map pack and that involves creating new monsters sprites. But I'm wondering how to go about it... I have a tendency to overthink and overcomplicate things, so my idea to do it would be to create a 3D model with Blender, texture it, then take screenshots from every required angle and scale them down to bitmaps. Is that the proper way of doing? How did the guys at id create the original monster sprites?

[Nootrac4571]

Your Blender model pipeline is a perfectly valid - and probably the most sensible - way of making sprites for Doom these days. Please go ahead and make some lovely new monsters.

 

But the original Id methods were a lot more low-fi and labour-intensive: Most of the Doom 1/2 monsters were based on actual physical maquettes created by Adrian Carmack and Gregor Punchatz, animated via stop-motion and photographed from 8 different angles, then converted to sprites via a very time consuming process of pixel clean-up and palette conversion:

 

Edited March 19, 2022 by Nootrac4571

[Gez]

1 hour ago, DamTheGreat said:

How did the guys at id create the original monster sprites?

If you want the long story, I can only recommend reading our lovingly maintained Doom Wiki at DoomWiki.org, notably:

• Development of Doom
• Artwork of Doom
• Models
• Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop

 

Nowadays, most people who create original sprites start from 3D models. At least for anything that has both animation and rotations; it's so much easier to keep things consistent between the many sprites. Your Blender pipeline is pretty standard, but you may be interested in these threads:

Doom Sprite Batch Render addon for Blender 2.9+ on the ZDoom forums.

 

[DamTheGreat]

20 hours ago, Gez said:

If you want the long story, I can only recommend reading our lovingly maintained Doom Wiki at DoomWiki.org, notably:

• Development of Doom
• Artwork of Doom
• Models
• Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop

 

Nowadays, most people who create original sprites start from 3D models. At least for anything that has both animation and rotations; it's so much easier to keep things consistent between the many sprites. Your Blender pipeline is pretty standard, but you may be interested in these threads:

Doom Sprite Batch Render addon for Blender 2.9+ on the ZDoom forums.

 

 

THanks! Those addons are very helpful, it's exactly what I'm looking for.

Edited March 20, 2022 by DamTheGreat

[gwain]

lmao I use an old version of mspaint and mine turn out fine but I just do edits

Spoiler

 

[Dark Pulse]

22 hours ago, Nootrac4571 said:

But the original Id methods were a lot more low-fi and labour-intensive: Most of the Doom 1/2 monsters were based on actual physical maquettes created by Adrian Carmack and Gregor Punchatz, animated via stop-motion and photographed from 8 different angles, then converted to sprites via a very time consuming process of pixel clean-up and palette conversion:

 

As an aside: I'm surprised nobody has taken advantage of these good-quality photographs of the original models to try to recreate those models as accurately as possible in Blender, so that we could get "new" frames with "old" assets.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Dark Pulse

[Nootrac4571]

27 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

I'm surprised nobody has taken advantage of these good-quality photographs of the original models to try to recreate those models as accurately as possible in Blender

 

Amazingly, the sculptor of the original model is actually working on that right now:

 

 

[Dark Pulse]

4 minutes ago, Nootrac4571 said:

 

Amazingly, the sculptor of the original model is actually working on that right now:

 

 

But are we gonna get to use the fruits of this labor, that's the question...

[Nikku4211]

Oh nice, Blender. This means you can actually get an .MD2 exporter script that works with Blender and get the actual model working in several Doom source ports like GZDoom or Doomsday.