Advice For Monster Creation

[Ghost_Ellis]

Heyo, sorry for so many posts today haha, just wondering if there are any guides to monster creation, specifically regarding the pixel art for the sprites.

I made a monster, but it does not look as good as I'd like. Just wondering ig if there's a way to know what size the sprites should be, or how to make it look smoother when turning. for example, the side profiles of my monster are too thin compared to the front/back, and same goes for the angled sprites. Ig I just wanna be able to make it look clean, so it's easier to look at.

[Nihlith]

Base resource monsters tend to be about as big in units as their sprites are in pixels. You can scale them with default settings to match the image with the monsters size if they don't match. 

Turning monsters tends to be a challenge, especially for the diagonal sprites. In the original game they used models to overcome this. Most people seem to edit existing sprites in order to get past this but if you can use a model, do that. 

[magicsofa]

Take a look at the original monsters to get an idea of sizing... the humanoid sprites are around 54-60 pixels tall. You'll also notice that the side view sprites are often much wider than the front or back views to account for a gun or leg sticking out. The animations don't include any frames where both legs are exactly lined up. Also they tend to have big beefy chests and arms... if you look at zombieman, he couldn't even fit his hand halfway around his own bicep :P Now of course they are supposed to be muscly marine bois but the point is that isn't critical for things to be perfectly realistic, sometimes making stuff a little bigger for readability is better than having correct proportions.

 

Also keep in mind that Doom has tall pixels! In Slade you can turn on "Aspect Ratio Correction" when viewing a sprite in order to see exactly what this means. Basically, all of your sprites are going to end up 1/5 taller in the game. This actually works nicely for things that are supposed to be tall, such as humanoids, columns, doors, etc. However if you draw a perfect circle, in Doom it will appear as a vertical oval. So in order to achieve a circular shape you will need to squash your circle a little bit (horizontal oval)

Edited May 31 by magicsofa