OK, this tutorial will teach you how to make good enemy sprites in Wolf3d without using many colours and still looking detailed.

Keep in mind that it’s easy to draw this way, but still requires a lot of practice and patience.

You can use any paint program you’re comfortable with.

1) Start by defining what type of enemy you want to make, is he going to be a soldier, a cowboy, a gangster?

If you’re good at drawing in paper, maybe you can make a sketch to guide you through the rest of the process, if not, at least keep a good mental image of how he should look like.

I’m a big fan of Steven Seagal (his earlier movies though) so that’s why I’ll make him an enemy in this tutorial.

Take a look at the finished sprite:

Does it look like him? For a Wolf3d sprite I guess so (Ponytail included J).

2) Now define the sprite’s general appearance:

You can draw only half and then copy and invert it thus giving symmetry to the model (=good thing).

The clothes in one colour, and the skin in other. (If you want you can use more colours)

3) Let’s pass on to the real colours the sprite will wear:

For that you need the Wolf3d palette

I chose the colours Steven Seagal wears in his films (black jacket and light blue jeans). Now paint your ‘red’ model with the new colours.

Starting to look good? Not yet, but just wait.

4) Time to add shadows and lights:

This is the trickiest part and requires a lot of attention:

Better, huh?

Notice how I modified his arms. This is because he’s not a guard and making him stand firmly with his arms parallel to his body would have looked incorrect.

Close up

I generally use four colours for clothes. The darkest one for details and to separate torso from arms, one leg from the other etc.

Then I use the others to apply shades.

Shades are not straight lines but more ‘random’ ones so to give the appearance of wrinkles.

Compare the pants in both pictures, see the difference?

5) You think clothes were hard, well skin is harder.

Skin has to use more colours to look right. It would be a shame to ruin your sprite with just a plain colour skin.

Anyway start out with base colours:

Yeah, I know it looks funny.

Now apply some expression to his face.

I’ll tell you a little trick, by painting darker squares above his eyes you can define his mood.

See? Squares on top and to the inner side and he looks really angry.

And yeah, I know it still looks funny.

Keep applying colours (can’t really help you there, it takes practice) until it looks something like this:

Now he looks fine.

Now your creation should look like this:

In my case I didn’t like his legs much, so I spread them a little bit. So it looked more natural:

Here’s our sprite in its finished form.

Here are some other samples of sprites I made:

Clint Eastwood fan? Or Lee Van Cleef’s? He’ll be back

Soldier ‘Sanitarium zombie’

Hope you liked this tutorial and sorry for my ‘funny’ English. I’ll try to make a 1^st person weapons tutorial in the future.

Oh and:

Please don’t use these images for any projects without asking me first.

Matt.