BFG / Exit door source

[Nootrac4571]

My early Christmas present to myself just arrived!

 

 

For those who aren't aware, it's the toy gun which was photographed to make the BFG sprites and a few textures, like the exit door. Tomorrow I'm planning to take a bunch of measurements and hi-res photos from every angle, and share them for the benefit of folks making HD textures and 3D models.

 

It's much bigger than I expected, having only seen pictures on the internet before. Almost as long as my forearm.

 

Sadly, even with fresh new batteries, it doesn't seem to work, so without prising it open and fixing whatever connection is broken I can't tell you how good the "hundreds of battle action sounds" are.

 

[***** EDIT: I've noticed that a couple of sites have credited me as having discovered the existence of the toy gun - this isn't the case at all, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough. Other people discovered this years ago. All I did was notice that there was one for sale on eBay. *****]

Edited March 20, 2019 by Nootrac4571

[Gaia74]

send a photo with the view of a bfg9000 :v

[Nootrac4571]

9 minutes ago, Gaia74 said:

send a photo with the view of a bfg9000 :v

 

Oh, absolutely - once I set up the light box and decent camera tomorrow I will bore you to death with photos.

[Linguica]

[Nootrac4571]

A couple of preliminary images - I didn't get time to properly set things up over Christmas, so these are far lower quality than intended. I will post much better pictures as soon as I get the chance.

 

Right side view (the side which the BFG was taken from:)

 

 

Left side view: (used for some TEKWALL patches - you can see the round buttons on them:)

 

 

Mirrored perspective view: (Not quite at the perfect angle, but fairly close. I will take a better shot when I get the chance:)

 

 

Original sprite for comparison:

 

 

As it happens I'm working on a job right now with access to a very good camera and proper studio lights, so I should be able to take some much better pictures in the next week or two. After dithering for a bit about whether to despoil an archaeological relic, I think I've decided to peel off the "THE MACHINE" sticker, which will make for more BFG-accurate images.

Edited January 1, 2019 by Nootrac4571

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Nootrac4571 said:

 

As it happens I'm working on a job right now with access to a very good camera and proper studio lights, so I should be able to take some much better pictures in the next week or two. After dithering for a bit about whether to despoil an archaeological relic, I think I've decided to peel off the "THE MACHINE" sticker, which will make for more BFG-accurate images.

To be honest, that sticker could probably disappear with a minimal amount of photoshopping - the area on the BFG sprite where it would be is virtually blanked.

[Chris Moyer]

@Van Daemon check this out!

[ukiro]

Very nice! This weapon also makes an appearance in my texture set OTEX, seen here in Eviternity map09:

 

[Van Daemon]

On 1/20/2019 at 4:11 AM, Chris Moyer said:

@Van Daemon check this out!

This is simply wonderful I love it 

[DarkShroom]

wow... amazing, i need two of these, a dremel and some paint

[Nootrac4571]

So a week or two turned into a month, but I've finally got a spare moment, so:

 

 

Mirrored, with a bit of photoshopping:

 

 

 

Comparison with original sprite:

 

[Job]

Dang. 

[elend]

This is legitimately the most accurate highres sprite job ever. (Apart from that missing BFG logo)

[SirJuicyLemon]

5 hours ago, Nootrac4571 said:

Comparison with original sprite:

 

Damn that looks really good!

[Nootrac4571]

13 hours ago, elend said:

This is legitimately the most accurate highres sprite job ever. (Apart from that missing BFG logo)

 

I'm going to try to add that in a few days, as well as improve the colour accents, as I did them pretty quickly on a laptop rather than my proper machine.

 

The next bit is trying to recreate the barrel at the top. That's from a photo of a "Rambo" licensed toy M60, (also used for the Plasma Gun,) which is harder to find and probably a lot more expensive, so I might have to fake it instead.

[Nootrac4571]

I've done a bit more work on this - edited a bunch of shadows and highlights to better match the lighting of the original sprite, redrawn the tinted areas, and added the "BFG" label in the bottom right:

 

 

Comparison with original sprite:

 

 

And just for fun, downscaled and paletized to match the original:

 

 

Still don't know what I'm going to do about the barrel though. I had a quick look to see if I could find the Rambo dart-firing M-60 for sale anywhere, but no luck (and one long-expired listing had it priced at $500! Blimey.)

 

There are a few pictures of the relevant part floating around, but none from a straight-down-the-barrel perspective.

 

[Space Marinara]

Maybe someone can neural upscale the barrel until a real one surfaces?

[elend]

That looks really good. I think a decent enough render of the barrel should suffice?!

[Nootrac4571]

2 hours ago, Space Marinara said:

Maybe someone can neural upscale the barrel until a real one surfaces?

 

That might not be a bad start. The target resolution is about 15x the original though, so it'd be asking a lot from the algorithm to go all the way.

 

1 hour ago, elend said:

That looks really good. I think a decent enough render of the barrel should suffice?!

 

Yeah, I think that's what I might do. I'm not amazing at 3D modelling though. It'll be a good excuse to get some practice in anyway.

[Nootrac4571]

I'm still working on this - planning on modelling the barrel in 3D, but there's a slight issue: There's a bit of detailing which is pretty open to interpretation. Specifically, the vertical line at the centre:

 

 

The problem is, this detail doesn't seem to exist in the actual physical toy - the top of the plastic barrel appears to be completely smooth and featureless:

 

     

 

As far as I can tell - and this is a bit of a conjecture, so I may be wrong - the vertical line is an artefact of the way the sprite was created. if you look closely, you can see that both sides are completely identical; only one side of the barrel is actually digitised, then flipped to create the other side. I think this is what's going on:

 

 

This means two things:

 

1) The PG and BFG barrels in the sprites are substantially wider than the actual toy.

2) the detail in the centre doesn't exist anywhere other than in the final sprites, so there isn't any further information as to what exactly it should look like in HD.

So I'm going to have to take some artistic license. I've got to decide how I'm going to interpret that tiny line of pixels.

 

Some options:

 

 

What do people reckon? Any preferences?

[Space Marinara]

Before reading your analysis I would have sworn it should look like the middle-right example but I have to say the lower-left makes sooo much more sense now.

[Nootrac4571]

15 minutes ago, Space Marinara said:

Before reading your analysis I would have sworn it should look like the middle-right example but I have to say the lower-left makes sooo much more sense now.

 

I absolutely agree - Middle-right was my initial plan before properly looking into it, but lower left makes more sense physically. But I think making it match how the sprite actually looks is probably more important than trying to reflect what's actually going on with the digitised photos. Maybe?

[elend]

Yeah, middle right would be my favourite as well.

[Empyre]

I like top right the best, but middle right is good, too.

 

On the sides, I think it is supposed to be ridges rather than grooves, and at least as tall as they are wide, sort of like cooling fins.  If you are going to stick with grooves, make them at least twice as deep.

[Besli]

I also quote for the middle right version.

 

Best fucking HD version of the BFG!

[Marlamir]

Shoot me, i completely miss that thread. Some great stuff is here. 

 

9 hours ago, Nootrac4571 said:

What do people reckon? Any preferences?

I would say that the middle right is winner for me as well

[ketmar]

for me, it is definitely lower left. what is the reason of those... things on the right side? it definitely doesn't look like something that has a reason to exist. while lower left looks logical.

[Nootrac4571]

Quick diversion: It occurred to me that since the BFG is based on a mirrored, cropped photo of the plastic gun, why not flip it around and see what happens if you use the side that was cropped off instead? Like, the bizarro-world version of the gun?

 

Well, you sort of get the 0009GFB, I suppose:

 

 

Anyway, I used this to make a few BFG variant sort of things. If anyone wants to use them for anything, feel free:

 

 

(Doom-scaled, palettized .png:)

 

Edited March 20, 2019 by Nootrac4571

[ketmar]

that can be a nice sprite for some alternative/advanced BFG in weapon mods, i guess. it looks great, and still resembles the original BFG enough to be recognizable!

[Dark Pulse]

Model 0009, Giant Fucking Barrel.