Digitized Weapons - Best way to make them look DOOMISH

[Hidden Hands]

This is a bit of a struggle for me to get right, but I have digitized a bunch of custom weapons from real props I have and I'm trying to get them to match up nicely with the DOOM ones. But the ones I've made looks more like ... well, shrunk photos. They do not look good in comparison to the DOOM ones. I've seen some peoples custom weapons that look incredibly good and blend in nicely with the originals. Does anyone know what effect they are using or is there a certain filter or trick I hsould consider?

Thanks in advance.

[ramon.dexter]

Certain filter or effect? Some magical button that you will push and something will turn the photo into a fitting doom atyled sprite? Good luck on this.

You know, in reality, this magical button is called 'ton of hard handy work with trial and error also'

[wildweasel]

To be able to offer advice that works for you, I'd need to see your raw photo, and what it looks like in game.

[Ashat Maself]

This is a bit of a struggle for me to get right, but I have digitized a bunch of custom weapons from real props I have and I'm trying to get them to match up nicely with the DOOM ones. But the ones I've made looks more like ... well, shrunk photos. They do not look good in comparison to the DOOM ones. I've seen some peoples custom weapons that look incredibly good and blend in nicely with the originals. Does anyone know what effect they are using or is there a certain filter or trick I hsould consider?

Thanks in advance.

If you send an imgur link to the pictures I could give some advice

[Hidden Hands]

Ok, I'm usually reluctant to share assetts before release since my game is a commercial product and I do not want my assets being used in other peoples projects but in this instance I really do need some help. I've spent hours messing about with these but have ended up scrapping them all.

This is the original (or close to original) size sprites from photos.


These are the scaled down ones.


I'm not looking for a miracle button or anything like that. But I need some kind of advice to make this look good.... and not just like a cut-out of a picture in game. It seems nothing I do makes it work right.

Thanks in advance.

[jdredalert]

In all my years making sprites here i made numerous guns made out of 3D models screen caps, but never tried digitized photos. This could be a nice challenge! I'll try editing the image first, and if i have good results, i'll report back!


EDIT - I made a rough try. The one in the right is the edited sprite, and the one in the left is the cropped, untouched picture. I can give you the instructions via PM or Discord later, unfortunately i have to go now.

Tell me what you think about it.

[wildweasel]

Some general tips I can give for you based on the source image:

- Contrast! Strong lighting and shadowing on your actual photo helps a lot, but exaggerating the contrast in your graphics program can better sell your look, make it fit your choice of palette more easily, and make it look less flat.

- Choice of background is important! Professionals use green screens for a reason. You probably don't have one, but using, say, a solid colored bed sheet tacked to a wall can help give you a nice distinct color that you can easily chroma key out, without spending hours trimming around the edges.

- Focus! If you have any way to manually focus, use it; you're trying to focus the shot on the fine details of your gun, to reduce the blurry edges, especially in the important spots that will be hard to redraw.

[Hidden Hands]

In all my years making sprites here i made numerous guns made out of 3D models screen caps, but never tried digitized photos. This could be a nice challenge! I'll try editing the image first, and if i have good results, i'll report back!


EDIT - I made a rough try. The one in the right is the edited sprite, and the one in the left is the cropped, untouched picture. I can give you the instructions via PM or Discord later, unfortunately i have to go now.

Tell me what you think about it.

Considering you said this was a rough try, you have already improved on my original by miles! Did you apply a palette to it? It looks far better than my own attempts did! The shading alone is miles better!

Some general tips I can give for you based on the source image:

- Contrast! Strong lighting and shadowing on your actual photo helps a lot, but exaggerating the contrast in your graphics program can better sell your look, make it fit your choice of palette more easily, and make it look less flat.

- Choice of background is important! Professionals use green screens for a reason. You probably don't have one, but using, say, a solid colored bed sheet tacked to a wall can help give you a nice distinct color that you can easily chroma key out, without spending hours trimming around the edges.

- Focus! If you have any way to manually focus, use it; you're trying to focus the shot on the fine details of your gun, to reduce the blurry edges, especially in the important spots that will be hard to redraw.

Ah thank you. Yes this true I tried to use a plain wall for taking the photos during to limitations on resources. These were mostly taken with a Galaxy A10 and edited through GIMP. I do find myself cutting the edges out for hours as you say though and it's usually rough and jagged.

[jdredalert]

Considering you said this was a rough try, you have already improved on my original by miles! Did you apply a palette to it? It looks far better than my own attempts did! The shading alone is miles better!

Well, thanks! What i did was basically apply some contrast to it, used a tad bit of unsharp mask and quickly painted what i believed to be wooden parts. I had to shade the barrel of the weapon manually, a few quick not too hardened brushes and after that, imported into Slade and converted to Doom palette. However, some colors in the arm messed up and i had to convert it back to png and export it one more time into GIMP to manually correct those messed pixels. I'm not too good with shading yet and did a very half-assed paint job, that's why in my opinion the sprite could be better, but these are the basic steps i took in order to make it look more like a 90's fps aesthetic. If you catch me on Discord, we can try to make it better later.

[Hidden Hands]

Drop me your discord I'll join you.