Are you interested in an HD 2D styled Doom Remaster?

[MistycSpider]

TL;DR: I wanna remaster and make renditions of the in-game sprites, not the clay models. Are you interested in playing something like this? Yay or Nay? 




I've been thinking on making a doom mod/texture pack that replaces the old sprite textures (monsters, weapons, players [and maybe walls and floors]) with a completely new 2D HD style always trying to be faithful to the original. Would you like to see it in the long term future?
I'd like to do it but wanna know if players would be interested on it before start working in something of that size.

Imp Sketches, to show an example of what I'm refering to.

Edit: Ok, I see a lot of confusion here. So maybe I'll do a new post with more detailed and better examples.
First of All, as many of you already know, the original sprites were not hand-drawn, they were clay sculptures (not plasticine as someone said before) that were digitalized and compressed and renderized into a very low resolution to fit in the game as sprites (kinda like the oposite to the upscaling process), it is known as pre-renderization, it is a process that a lot of games in that era use to show mind-blowing graphics, like the Donkey Kong country trilogy, Mario Kart 64, Mortal Kombat or Killer Instinct, even some of the current ones like Five night's at Freddy's.

We don't have any way to get our own hands on those original models (if they still exist), and we don't have enough samples of every of them neither, so trying to achieve a 1:1, of the original sculptures before being renderized is impossible. That's what projects like the upscalings shown in other comments try to achieve, the problem is, upscaling tries to make an HD image from a low resolution sprite, so in order to do it, it has to invent information out of nowhere, turning out in very strange ways like looking as oil paintings while other look photorealistic, or misunderstanding some details.

Also, when the sprites were renderized into such a low resolution, the lack of information made them look very different to their clay counterparts (not even taking in count most of them were edited to look different and fit better in the game), so the feeling of them is way different from what a real HD version would feel like. All those projects lack the sensitivity to realize that most of the final result of the 93' game is just illustrative to what's happening on screen, and that is the (my) main problem.

So, what is my project about? what's my goal? I wanna make 2D renditions of the original in-game sprites, with the goal of capture the feeling of those sprites and how it actually feels to play it, that way it still feels the same, but with a completely new look, one that looks actually great in new LDC monitors without the lack of cohesion coming from very low-res Sprites/textures and high-res rendering. Achieveing in that way a faithful remaster not of the product, but the result, the experience and feelings of playing Doom.

There are some other games that have made this with very great results, such as Wonder Boy The Dragons Trap, or Le'chuck's Revenge Special Edition.
Imagine the result of it like what the Final Fantasy Origins did to the original, or Zero Mission with the original Metroid.

I still have to decide what aproach would be better, if stylized with linearts (like the sketches but much more refined and colorized with shadows and lighting), or something lineless and more organic.

This project won't be something simple or easy, it is a titanic work and will take a long of time, probably years, that's why am saying "in the long term". I'm an animation student, so I have a realistic idea of the size of something like this, that's why I'm pointing to only sprites, but MAYBE the project scope change allowing also the textures being reworked. So my goal for now is it being so faithful that the new monsters and weapons feel cohesive even in the low-res original environments.

 

 

Edited June 20 by MistycSpider

[JoJo_BadDoom]

If I'm not mistaken, similar things have been tried before? I think.

It would be a tricky thing to get right. The limitations of the sprites works in conjunction with the comparatively simpler level design of Doom. To have more complicated sprites and textures surrounded by simple geometry would make things look quite out of place.

Of course, maybe this would fit better with more modern and more detailed levels, but I don't think something like this would be visually cohesive.

[Xaser]

"HD Sprites" is one of those cursed project concepts that never, ever seems to work. The amount of time and effort it takes to replace Doom's entire sprite set, including every monster in the game, is absolutely herculean. Many people have tried (often having no idea how big the project is), and every attempt* has fallen well short of the goal in some way or another.

 

That said, the sketches you're showing look less to me like an "HD Sprites" project and more like a "Stylized sprites" project -- which is actually a way more interesting concept. If you can produce sprites in the same style you're showing off in your sketches there, and just roll with that (rather than try and match the look of the originals "but HD" or whatever), you might just make something cool here.

 

It's still a fuck-ton of work though.

 

 

 

[*I'm talking Doom here -- other communities have managed to pull this off, e.g. Marathon, so it's certainly not impossible in theory. In practice, though, we're 30 years strong and still waiting. :P ]

[Gez]

10 minutes ago, Xaser said:

[*I'm talking Doom here -- other communities have managed to pull this off, e.g. Marathon, so it's certainly not impossible in theory. In practice, though, we're 30 years strong and still waiting. :P ]

Well, there was that neural upscale project a few years ago already.

 

[Xaser]

True, the neural upscale is definitely the best result, but IMO a lot of the textures ended up looking like oil paintings. The sprites did fare much better though, which is a rarity -- somewhere in there, there's a hypothetical "perfect" HD sprite project if someone is brave enough to the time to go through and pixel-edit everything.

 

Neural upscaling in general is a bit sketchy in hindsight, what with all the modern AI image generation shenanigans going on, but I dunno offhand how many of those troubles the old models from 2018 are subject to. I don't know the tech well enough to make a judgment call on that one, just mentioning it in advance before someone else does. :P

[TasAcri]

32 minutes ago, Xaser said:

"HD Sprites" is one of those cursed project concepts that never, ever seems to work. The amount of time and effort it takes to replace Doom's entire sprite set, including every monster in the game, is absolutely herculean. Many people have tried (often having no idea how big the project is), and every attempt* has fallen well short of the goal in some way or another.

I would agree in general but this recent Mario Kart HD project completely changed my mind:

 

https://github.com/GhostlyDark/MK64-HD

 

They re-made all the 3D models the sprites are based on and prerendered them in HD from scratch. And it looks amazing in motion.

 

 

So, in theory, what OP is trying to do can be done well. But IMO, only if those sprites are very faithful to the originals. Which means you got to hunt down those clay models ID used for most of the monsters and use them as the source, like they did. Of course, you will have to do the same with the map textures but thankfully there are a few faithful HD texture projects for that.

 

Edited June 19 by TasAcri

[Xaser]

Maybe the mystery at this point is the fact that it hasn't been done well, since the game's been around for a long while and it's not like we have any shortage of great artists around these parts. But those folks are always busy cranking out awesome new stuff -- e.g. I know Cage would be able to pull off an HD Doom set but he's putting those skills to good use on Supplice instead. :P

 

There's one shining beacon of an exception: Cheello's voxel models -- those are fucking great, and nail the style exactly. But even then, those are at the OG resolution, so you couldn't really use 'em as a base for something like this. But you'd be looking at something in the vein of that level of complexity, at a minimum, and that was a Big Ass Project(tm).

[SpruceWayne]

Theres a decent number of projects that are similar in idea or focus as this. Maybe not all have the same mission goal but generally have the same type of impact.

 

Lets see here, theres

 

Animdoom-- This is one is like a neural upscale but taken to a very high degree. kind like a x16 or higher? Its a 1 GB size file using hi-res type formatting thingy

 

Doom BSMS(But Slightly More Spooky)-- This one changes everything for art and is adapted mainly Realm667 stuff but doesnt change any mechanics. Cryonaut says it works on Chocolate Doom

 

Doom3D-- kind of a funny entry I think it kind of counts. its idea was reimagining Doom as a mid-90s true 3D type shooter. The models are sourced and modified from the DoomsDay port from what I remember. Definitely not a vanilla mechanics mod, still really cool for holding true to its mission statement.

[Shepardus]

There's an ongoing HD sprites project, no monster sprites though:

 

[Amaruψ]

1 minute ago, Shepardus said:

There's an ongoing HD sprites project, no monster sprites though:

 

 

My pet peeve against such projects is not including anymore additional details to the sprites that they're upscaling. For example, the chaingun still looks the same, but now it looks like an oil painting. The rocket launcher looks like someone's first attempt at Paint 3D. 

[camper]

This is an extremely difficult task. Monsters don’t need to be drawn, they need to be sculpted from plasticine and photographed in different positions. It seems that Adrian Carmack made models of monsters, which were photographed, digitized and processed in a graphics editor.

Spoiler

 

[eanasir]

13 minutes ago, camper said:

This is an extremely difficult task. Monsters don’t need to be drawn, they need to be sculpted from plasticine and photographed in different positions. It seems that Adrian Carmack made models of monsters, which were photographed, digitized and processed in a graphics editor.

  Hide contents

 

Just sculpting something would be quite hard without a base design. You have to draw first in order to actually sculpt the monsters.

Edited June 19 by eanasir

[MistycSpider]

Ok, I see a lot of confusion here. So maybe I'll do a new post with more detailed and better examples.
First of All, as many of you already know, the original sprites were not hand-drawn, they were clay sculptures (not plasticine as someone said before) that were digitalized and compressed and renderized into a very low resolution to fit in the game as sprites (kinda like the oposite to the upscaling process), it is known as pre-renderization, it is a process that a lot of games in that era use to show mind-blowing graphics, like the Donkey Kong country trilogy, Mario Kart 64, Mortal Kombat or Killer Instinct, even some of the current ones like Five night's at Freddy's.

We don't have any way to get our own hands on those original models (if they still exist), and we don't have enough samples of every of them neither, so trying to achieve a 1:1, of the original sculptures before being renderized is impossible. That's what projects like the upscalings shown in other comments try to achieve, the problem is, upscaling tries to make an HD image from a low resolution sprite, so in order to do it, it has to invent information out of nowhere, turning out in very strange ways like looking as oil paintings while other look photorealistic, or misunderstanding some details.

Also, when the sprites were renderized into such a low resolution, the lack of information made them look very different to their clay counterparts (not even taking in count most of them were edited to look different and fit better in the game), so the feeling of them is way different from what a real HD version would feel like. All those projects lack the sensitivity to realize that most of the final result is illustrative to what's happening on screen, and that is the (my) main problem, they try to achieve point-less and impossible results.

So, what is my project about? what's my goal? I wanna make 2D renditions of the original sprites, with the goal of capture the feeling of those sprites and how it actually feels to play it, that way it still feels the same, but with a completely new look, one that looks actually great in new LCD monitors without the lack of cohesion coming from very low-res Sprites/textures and high-res rendering. Achieveing in that way a faithful remaster not of the product, but the result, the experience and feelings of playing Doom.

There are some other games that have made this with very great results, such as Wonder Boy The Dragons Trap, or Le'chuck's Revenge Special Edition.
Imagine the result of it like what the Final Fantasy Origins did to the original, or Zero Mission with the original Metroid.

I still have to decide what aproach would be better, if stylized with linearts (like the sketches but much more refined and colorized with shadows and lightning), or something lineless and more organic.

This project wouldn't be something simple, it is a titanic work and will take a long of time, probably years, that's why am saying "in the long term". I'm an animation student, so I have a realistic idea of the size of something like this, that's why I'm pointing to only sprites, but MAYBE the project scope change allowing also the textures being reworked. So my goal for now is it being so faithful that the new monsters and weapons feel cohesive even in the low-res original environments.

These are two not even near to being finished lineless sketches (nor even planned for the project), but can give all of you a general idea.

 

Edited June 20 by MistycSpider

[MistycSpider]

4 hours ago, JoJo_BadDoom said:

If I'm not mistaken, similar things have been tried before? I think.

It would be a tricky thing to get right. The limitations of the sprites works in conjunction with the comparatively simpler level design of Doom. To have more complicated sprites and textures surrounded by simple geometry would make things look quite out of place.

Of course, maybe this would fit better with more modern and more detailed levels, but I don't think something like this would be visually cohesive.

Not sure if it is the goal of my project, I detailed it better in a comment, but what you describe has been already made with some remasters like the Tomb Raider trilogy which has very limited geometry

Edited June 20 by MistycSpider

[Gifty]

I've mulled this issue over a lot and have even considered taking it on myself as an outgrowth of my Smooth Doom project. I've concluded that the best solution would be to create 3D meshes from all the original character sculptures and generate all new sprite assets from those, as doing anything like this by hand would require a full-time team the likes of which most mod communities can't support. I also think you can't go much beyond X2 the original asset resolution before things start to look cursed and weird.

[MistycSpider]

11 minutes ago, Gifty said:

I've mulled this issue over a lot and have even considered taking it on myself as an outgrowth of my Smooth Doom project. I've concluded that the best solution would be to create 3D meshes from all the original character sculptures and generate all new sprite assets from those, as doing anything like this by hand would require a full-time team the likes of which most mod communities can't support. I also think you can't go much beyond X2 the original asset resolution before things start to look cursed and weird.

For a look that emulates the original intention, yes, 3-D models is indeed the best solution possible. But as I said what I want to do is a rendition of the actual sprites, not the clay models they´re based on. I'm someone who has a lot of respect for Pixelart, my aim with this is to create something that would be actually worth as an alternative to the original art, not a replacement.

It is still possible, as I said, I am an animation student so I have a very clear idea of the size of this, and while it will take time, I would take this as a hobby project, not something I would crunch in, at least at the beginning, just to see the interest of the community. And even if the final renders result to be limited to a x2 resolution, it is a very big difference when talking about sprites, we would go from the Doom 1 and 2 level of detail to the one present in 64.

And since this is me alone, I have limits with this project, tho. It's not in my plans to add in-between sprites for now, just aiming for the original set of sprites, which is a much more reasonable goal to aim, also limited to main sprites, like monsters, weapons, etc.

if the scope changes in time, it would be easy to continue working on the rest of sprites and just add in-betweens for the monster and weapon animations 

[Kinsie]

6 hours ago, Xaser said:

other communities have managed to pull this off, e.g. Marathon

Weren't the Marathon HD sprites ripped from the Xbox 360 port, meaning they had an actual budget put behind them?

[MistycSpider]

TL;DR: I wanna remaster and make renditions of the in-game sprites, not the clay models. Are you interested in something like this? Yay or Nay? 

[No-Man Baugh]

2 hours ago, MistycSpider said:

First of All, as many of you already know, the original sprites were not hand-drawn,

Not entirelly true: as the Imp, Lost Soul, and Pinkie demon were all totally hand-drawn (with only reference work being done from the player model, legs of a Jurrasic Park toy, and human skull model respectively)

and even the seven whole characters that were directly lifted from real-life models like the revenant or cyberdemon still weren't just raw downscaled captures of the things. they had to be touched up either to make them look more cohesive in-game like with Gregor Punchatz's latex models or to give them any color at all like with Adrien Carmack's totally colorless clay models

There's no getting around it even with a physical thing to reference in real life: you're at some point going to have to make guesstimates on how they're supposed to look



but to answer your main question: "Do I want this?"
And I'm simply the wrong kinda guy to be asked this question

I love Doom's pixelated look, and asking me if it should get hi-res graphics is like asking me if Citizen Kane should be colorized or if William Shakespear should be rewritten with modern vernacular; it's so defined by it's time that such a suggestion is a total non-sequitur for me. Even a project like Cheelo's Voxel Doom, which I followed since the Doom 1 version dropped and watched the production with baited breath as each Doom 2 asset video was dropped and saw integrate with the port that I play the most on, is a mod that I rarely turn on when playing casually

But what interests me about your project is the totally original art used to reimagine these monsters

It sounds like the kinda thing that if you downscaled and paletted the original art to work in vanilla doom: it would create a totally unique monster design; and that sounds really cool to me!

 

[JustAthel]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it -- I've grown to love the original sprite work and there's always something uncanny seeing these HD / upscaled / etc. projects, kind of in the same vein as those 3D recreational we saw a lot of back in the day. Doom definitely benefits from its pixely appearance. Not that there isn't an audience for this sort of thing, it's just not one I'm not a part of.

Edited June 20 by JustAthel

[Drywtler]

I read "HD 2D Doom Remaster" and I thought: How could you even translate Doom into something like Octopath Traveler?

A bit dissapointed that it was just reimagining the original assets in high definition... I personally don't use high definition anything when it comes to Doom but hey, different takes of the monsters, weapons and the rest of the assets are always welcome!

[Amaruψ]

The only viable way that I can see for creating a proper sprite-set for the monsters is to seek help from someone who dabbles into 3D modeling. They can recreate the monsters as 3D models as well as reimagine them, and once their models/animations are complete, you can take multiple screenshots of them to turn into sprites. 

 

Spoiler

 

 

I hope that this doesn't come off as discouraging or rude, but these wouldn't really pass for "HD". They seem more stylistic than anything else. It's as if I was to recreate a work from Van Gogh in the style of Edvard Munch and say that the end product is a remaster of the original. It isn't, it's more or less reinterpretation in a different style.

[No-Man Baugh]

Coming back to the subject and reminding myself of other similar official project: Hell yeah!

If the approach to this is similar to Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES or the Macintosh port of Wolfenstien 3D: Where the method of "HD"ifying these older games was to straight-up redraw them in a higher resolution then I could see giving it a try

 

30 minutes ago, Amaruψ said:

The only viable way that I can see for creating a proper sprite-set for the monsters is to seek help from someone who dabbles into 3D modeling. They can recreate the monsters as 3D models as well as reimagine them, and once their models/animations are complete, you can take multiple screenshots of them to turn into sprites.

Hard disagree. while I ain't the biggest fan of any of these "modernized" projects, I don't really see how basing the sprites off of 3D models would help any

Edited June 20 by No-Man Baugh

[Amaruψ]

7 minutes ago, No-Man Baugh said:

Hard disagree. while I ain't the biggest fan of any of these "modernized" projects, I don't really see how basing the sprites off of 3D models would help any

 

You can recreate high-res sprites through this process, my guy. Instead of passing through an upscaler or painstakingly redrawing everything by hand, it's far easy to do. Plus, games like Duke Nukem 3D has done it properly, and serves as a great example of the results that can be achieved through this.

[Gez]

2 hours ago, No-Man Baugh said:

Not entirelly true: as the Imp, Lost Soul, and Pinkie demon were all totally hand-drawn (with only reference work being done from the player model, legs of a Jurrasic Park toy, and human skull model respectively)

The Cacodemon was hand-drawn, too. And so the pain elemental, which is a caco frankensprite.

 

Clay models were used for the player/zombies, the baron/knight, and the cyberdemon. Latex models were used for the spiderdemon/arachnotron, the mancubus, the revenant, and the arch-vile.

 

So in total, models were only used for about 2/3 of the monsters.

3 minutes ago, No-Man Baugh said:

Hard disagree. while I ain't the biggest fan of any of these "modernized" projects, by far the worst looking demons I've seen come from the 3D model ones. you ever heard of seen the 3D models in DOOMSDAY or the mod DOOM3D?

The main problem with 3D models in Doom is that monster movement and animations were not designed for 3D models. The way they move works fine with sprites because sprites' lack of granularity force us to overinterpret what we see and basically fill in the blanks.  It's similar to the uncanny valley effect.

[Amaruψ]

To clear up the possible misinterpretation, I'm referring to using 3D models as bases to create sprites off of, like Doom 64 does. So instead of using a clay model, you just use a 3D model. I'm not saying that the only viable way to do so is to replace sprites with 3D models. Far from that.

Edited June 20 by Amaruψ

[MistycSpider]

1 hour ago, Amaruψ said:

The only viable way that I can see for creating a proper sprite-set for the monsters is to seek help from someone who dabbles into 3D modeling. They can recreate the monsters as 3D models as well as reimagine them, and once their models/animations are complete, you can take multiple screenshots of them to turn into sprites. 

 

  Hide contents

 

 

I hope that this doesn't come off as discouraging or rude, but these wouldn't really pass for "HD". They seem more stylistic than anything else. It's as if I was to recreate a work from Van Gogh in the style of Edvard Munch and say that the end product is a remaster of the original. It isn't, it's more or less reinterpretation in a different style.

It isn't rude at all, I get your point, maybe the term HD is what is misleading everyone now that I think on it, in animation we usually refer as HD to anything that doesn't look quite pixelated, that's what I was refering to, that the project would be on a higher resolution than the original 200p the og sprites were made for. I actually know how to model myself, but I don't really like doing it tbh, and also kind of detailed 2-D drawings still would have been needed to properly translate an style like this into 3D, and even hand-drawn textures since there are no real life materials for demons. I think I explained it better in the edited section, tho

Edited June 20 by MistycSpider

[Sinnesloeschen]

Personally i feel the low-res "crunchyness" of Dooms textures is part of the appeal and the game loses a bit of its "artistic coherency" (For the lack of a better word) when the textures are too "hi res". A bit like 3D remakes of 2D games. I think that's why there was never that big of a push for a HD texture rework.

 

That being said, seeing how AI is becoming more of a viable tool, i just wondered if it would be possible to use it to add/extrapolate additonal "directions" for the sprites. Basically turning the 8-Directional sprites into 16,32,etc-Directional sprites.

I would love to see what an "almost" 360 degree sprite would look like and how a game with that "art style" would feel to play.

[MistycSpider]

37 minutes ago, No-Man Baugh said:

Coming back to the subject and reminding myself of other similar official project: Hell yeah!

If the approach to this is similar to Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES or the Macintosh port of Wolfenstien 3D: Where the method of "HD"ifying these older games was to straight-up redraw them in a higher resolution then I could see giving it a try

This is exactly what I'm thinking on, as in the edited section I mentioned FF origins or Le'chuck Revenge Special Edition.

 

The differential thing here is, those are based on the actual concept art, I want it to be based on the final in-game sprites, since they look and were very different from the original clay-models or even the original drawings.

I want it to look faithful to what we as players see in screen, not what it was actually intended to be portrayed, if it makes any sense said in that way.

 

I'm also a very purist gamer, I play on nugget with everything in vanilla but the fuzz effect since the og spectre effect doesn't work on LCD monitors. I also love works like Smooth project and Voxel, but I hardly ever turn them on.

 

I don't want to replace the sprites, I'm myself a picel artist and projects that aim for that are like heresy for me, and I've always hated those AI upscale takes the mod community is always trying to bring back.

I want to offer an alternative, one that still feels like the old doom we all know, one that is worth playing time to time without letting the original aside.

Edited June 20 by MistycSpider

[MistycSpider]

31 minutes ago, Amaruψ said:

 

You can recreate high-res sprites through this process, my guy. Instead of passing through an upscaler or painstakingly redrawing everything by hand, it's far easy to do. Plus, games like Duke Nukem 3D has done it properly, and serves as a great example of the results that can be achieved through this.

Unless you're pointing to a renderized kind of realistic style, it is actually harder to do. Take in count Doom and Duke Nukem where aiming for that at the time, what we see nowadays as cartoony pork cops where kinda photorealistic at the time.