The WIP Thread

[Amuscaria]

Making the Imp in Zbrush. Trying to evaluate how much work would be necessary to make HD Doom sprites.

[Nash]

Trying to evaluate how much work would be necessary to make HD Doom sprites.

My personal experience working with rendered model sprites all these years... it's just as much work and just as tedious as traditional 2D spriting. :P I used to think models were the "cheat mode" to sprites, but to be honest your light setup and even the textures need to be given attention to detail to just the same as when you're spriting... in other words, it's not really a cheat mode because more often than not, it's a lot easier to produce bad/amateur renders.

The ultimate payoff is the scalability of your renders, and the obvious benefit of having correct perspective and lighting. But in terms of workload, IMO, both 2D and 3D are just as tedious. And actually, with 3D, the higher resolution your sprite renders will be, the MORE work you have to put into everything (geometry, textures, lighting) because then you can see everything clearly. With low res renders, the pixelation serves to hide your model's imperfections because there simply isn't enough pixels to show everything.

Also, with higher resolution sprites, more frames would be required, a 4-frame walk cycle simply won't cut it anymore. It starts to look very awkward. There is something about the model being very clear which accentuates a choppy animation. Again, with low res/blocky sprites, you could get away with 4 frames because your brain somehow fills in the missing details for you. What all this means is the higher the sprite resolution, you also need to spend much more time with your model rigging (which would lead back to the modeling stage because you need high quality topology) and careful weight painting to make sure every body part deforms realistically, because otherwise the bad weight painting will clearly show in the renders!

[leileilol]

Rendering sprites (without silly "detailed" texture materials) would be suitable for early Raven and 3D Realms aesthetics however (i.e. high poly mesh, but material's just barely a flat color with the specular being prominent), and even those still required a lot of pixel pushing correction and detail, as well as the care to not bleed into other color maps to create shading artifacts with the paletted lookups (in Blender you can probably cheat this by having the material result as a ramp with carefully picked colors).

Models to sprites pipelines are a pain to set up too, i've never actually done it in blender yet and am curious how it would work with a bit of automation. and since it's for "HD'ing a 1993 game, any attempt at high definition in such a game of its age will only accenutate the age further, especially when the actor code is so old and doesn't account for natural movement, motion tweening, bones etc. it'll be uncanny and fall into the same pit Doomsday always does.

[Captain J]

Making the Imp in Zbrush. Trying to evaluate how much work would be necessary to make HD Doom sprites.

Excellent 3D stuff and long time no see! Looks astonishingly amazing! :O

[Blox]

Trying to evaluate how much work would be necessary to make HD Doom sprites.

blerp

The entire reason you go through all the trouble with setting models up in the first place is not to "cheap out" on creating sprites, it's to cheap out on creating detailed animations for all rotations.
If you're not capable of making good animations then you should immediately start figuring it out, as otherwise you've been throwing your time out the window - unless your plan was to educate others who might be able to do it, in which case that's nice too I guess.

Creating one detailed portrait is fairly easy, making intricate animations is already difficult - remaking those animations for all rotations is a massive pain in the dick.

then add the whole "oh right there are more than just a single entity to do this for" factor and you've got yourself a nice 'i wanna die' situation

[DoomKrakken]

The other advantage to using 3D sprites - even if you're using them as a base for 2D sprite frames - is that you don't have to worry too much about perspective, as the 3D model already does that for you. You can then draw over that, if you like.

[Rachael]

If converting to a sprite, that depends on how you render the model. Parallel renders can and do happen. Overall though, that does not really matter much because you will not see perspective on sprites, anyway; they will look the same far away as they do up close. That may cause the resulting sprite to look somewhat artificial but many people will not immediately notice the difference.

Of course, having an actual model automatically wins out in all cases, though - because the model itself will be rendered in the game's 3D space.

[DoomKrakken]

I meant to add that this would most likely and most often apply to weapon sprites. I've seen it done for Guncaster's "Ironblast" super shotgun.

[leileilol]

On that Blender sprite pipeline, there was a py script released to help automate renders was there?

or am i going to have to .bat the render filenames

[Nash]

On that Blender sprite pipeline, there was a py script released to help automate renders was there?

or am i going to have to .bat the render filenames

https://github.com/seece/SpriteBatchRender is what I use and is freaking amazing

[DoomKrakken]

That looks cool.

I wonder if Dr. Pypsy knows about this... with what he's doing for Doom-style monster sprites from DOOM, this would most definitely come in handy...

[Amuscaria]

Oh sweet. Glad there is an automated program. :O

[Remmirath]

Brutalist concept architecture:

[DoomKrakken]

THIS RIGHT HERE is what I wanted in some maps. Well, just the architecture. It doesn't all need to be concrete, though.

[Remmirath]

THIS RIGHT HERE is what I wanted in some maps. Well, just the architecture. It doesn't all need to be concrete, though.

It's concrete-based brutalism. It needs to be all grey to be consistent. :V