Suggestions about creating a sprite-sheet

[Amaruψ]

Earlier last night, I took up the decision to make a handful of Doom monsters, who stuck out to me by being rather goofy when it came to their looks. I modified their appearances until I achieved these unsettling monstrosities below.

 

   

 

However, I'm not feeling quite confident in creating an entire sprite-sheet with these designs, solely because I've never done this before, and as such it's quite an alien process. I've done singular sprites before, but not entire sheets. I'd appreciate any suggestions to make them look seamlessly the part of the same sheet, and some advice.

 

Thanks in advance :)

[Kan3]

Welcome in the maddening world of making sprite's rotations x)

I don't think there are any shortcut without an actual 3d model, you just have to arm yourself with patience and good eye and draw them in every degree needed.

 

It sucks, I know, I have several unfinished product with just the front sprite for this reason.

What might help you out, is looking for similar custom monsters around, like on Realm667, and try to see if you can extrapolate some part of the sprites to copy-paste while making the remaining sprites.

 

For example, again on Realm667 there are a couple of grey Cacodemons that you could use to help you out with the missing rotations sprites, same goes for the imps and lost souls

 

(Also, they look awesome, I would be really interested in the pain elemental there *_*)

Edited October 1, 2023 by Kan3

[Burgish]

Really like your designs!

 

The main ingredient in any sprite sheet is time.  For anything with a walk animations you're looking at ~50 frames, although much less for floaters.  So don't get discouraged if its taking a while, thats par for the course.

 

The first thing I usually do is try to crack out as fast and crummy a sprite as I can for each rotation.  It doesn't need to be final-product nice, you just need to identify the elements in your design that you can copy/paste, use rotate or size tools on, and how the shading is going to work.  Then start making layers for each of those elements that you can jigsaw together for your various sprite poses.

 

Once you've got a clutch of spare parts it gets a lot easier iterating your sprites from a single frame that you're happy with.  Also, you'll be doing yourself a big favor if you leave the easiest/simplest stuff for last in case you get a bit burned out.

 

One more trick - keep all your working sprites in an otherwise empty folder and resize its window so that you see rows and columns of sprite rotations - if you're naming your sprites properly as you go they will line up alphabetically and it's easy see progress and what frames are missing, and its ready to zip with no extra work.