ZDoom

Has any one ever took photos of them selves holding guns(real or toys) and made sprites out of them. I so how did they turn out and what methods did you use?

I believe Neoworm used photos to make the hands for some of his Heretic sprites. Not guns, but same process.

i.e.

I actually made a crappy-looking AK-47 like this, and a less crappy flashlight-that-kills-shit.

wildweasel wrote:I actually made a crappy-looking AK-47 like this, and a less crappy flashlight-that-kills-shit.

they actually don't look to bad. the reason why I asked was that I have stated that I suck at sprite making and that I was going to try to be more self sufficient and our house is almost a stockpile of guns(I have a pellet gun plus some toy guns in my room and we have a bunch of rifles and a shotgun in the basement) so I figured why not try to take some photos of those and make sprites of them. the only problem is where is the best place to mount the camera.

I may have access to my uni's green-screen, camera & lighting equipment. Is it possible to do exciting sprite stuff with that?

Also I was going to make a centred uzi, but my uzi-watergun got thrown out.

My guess is to put the toy gun against a white background (paper? sheet?) , photo it then edit it on the computer

CaptainToenail wrote:I may have access to my uni's green-screen, camera & lighting equipment. Is it possible to do exciting sprite stuff with that?

Also I was going to make a centred uzi, but my uzi-watergun got thrown out.

My guess is to put the toy gun against a white background (paper? sheet?) , photo it then edit it on the computer

thank you kindly

It doesnt matter what background you use if you can distiunguish it from the actual sprite. Monochromatic and contrasting is of course better. But even with ideal settings you will need to cut it out almost manually.

I always repaint the photo almost completely. But the main reason is that I tried to replicate the original as much as possible. If you want to make original set you probably can save yourself some work. Still, prepare for very heavy editing.

neoworm wrote:But even with ideal settings you will need to cut it out almost manually.

I'm going to have to disagree with that. With the proper chromakey background (a solid green or blue; a color not in the item you are trying to capture) and good software (e.g. Photoshop) it can be rather easy to cut out. Indeed, I would think it would be too onerous to make a sprite in this matter if it weren't relatively easy to do each frame. The hard part is in the setup: the prop/person, proper background, and proper lighting. Then its just fooling around with batch setting in Photoshop till it properly processes your stack and you are well on your way to a sprite

Looks ready enough for a Duke mod, but would need quite a bit more editing (and some hair) to fit in Doom.

exwizard wrote:I'm going to have to disagree with that. With the proper chromakey background (a solid green or blue; a color not in the item you are trying to capture) and good software (e.g. Photoshop) it can be rather easy to cut out. Indeed, I would think it would be too onerous to make a sprite in this matter if it weren't relatively easy to do each frame. The hard part is in the setup: the prop/person, proper background, and proper lighting. Then its just fooling around with batch setting in Photoshop till it properly processes your stack and you are well on your way to a sprite

It will produce antialiased edges, which will fuckup the sprite when converting to DooM palette. You will still need to clean the edges.

White is easier to clean, especially if you have photoshop or any program with a inner-glow layer option. Even with the white anti-aliasing, all you need to do would be to apply an 'inner-glow' effect on your sprite, set the color to brown or something, and set the mode 'multiply'. That would darken your edges and remove most of the white anti-alias.

Of course, this would work with anything, but white is easier.

That sounds like a cool trick, Eriance, thanks for the tip.

neoworm wrote:It will produce antialiased edges, which will fuckup the sprite when converting to DooM palette. You will still need to clean the edges.

Take your photos in hi-res, cut the edges out automatically, then select on all the chromakey color, then expand your selection 1 or 2 pixels, and then delete. Done.

Though I understand your point if you were to try to extract sprites at the size of the original doom sprites.

If these schmucks can set up real-time chromakey-ing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjvqsB2EAuc so can you!

Here is an old attempt of mine, just posted it.
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=28693

Here is my new setup:

Character Sprites - Digital Camcorder, Lasy Susan, Chromakey screen, Studio Tent, Graphics Gale for editing.
Textures- Scanner and Digital Camera. Paintshop Pro 7, Adobe Imageready and Coreldraw for editing.