This project started as an animatic for my storyboarding class. We had to board out an action scene, so I pulled from what I was playing at the time. A mod for Doom II called “Hideous Destructor”. A tactical mod that goes to great pains to add “realistic” character movement to the character who famously controls more like a supersonic human tank, and adds a lot of very oppressive horror elements. It’s a nice reversal on the typical Doom formula of a superhuman against a thousand more tiny chess pieces, making even the lowest tier enemies knights and rooks rather than pawns. I wanted to take that more careful approach with this action sequence.

So I pulled from a moment that stuck out in my mind. Playing the Doom 64 maps, at the start of MAP02, I remember carefully taking out the hitscanner enemies, one of which carried a chaingun, who distracted me from an Imp, who hit me with a fireball in the back, so I mantled over the railing, grabbed the chaingun, and finally killed the Imp. It was such a small encounter but something about the fireball hitting me in the back and that causing me this moment of panic that lead to such a bombastic improvisation stuck out in my mind.

After realizing every enemy died from a headshot, the theme was clear. So I added the final part of the enemy getting back up and hitting Doomguy in the helmet as a final little joke. I was really worried it might be a little violent for a school project, but everyone seemed to really enjoy it. It all came together so nicely so I decided to turn it into a full animation.

2.5D animation in Blender is very fun. A lot of interesting combinations of new and old. If you’re not aware Doom doesn’t actually use 3D models for entities, but billboarded sprites, which I pulled from Doom and various mods here. Specifically “Project Brutality” and “Brutal Doom”, so the animation isn’t entirely mine admittedly, I’m not a great sprite artist.

One thing I found is that the method that most people use to do billboards in Blender, using the “Track To” constraint, is just… wrong? That turns the plane directly towards the camera rather than lay it flat against the perspective of the camera, which I found was better accomplished by using the “Copy Rotation” constraint. I also rendered it at a much lower resolution, partially because the fog volumes were killing the performance, partially because the edge of the planes were messing with rendering and that was less noticeable at lower resolutions, partially because, hey! The original game was at a lower resolution.

As for the new, I really enjoyed working with fog volumes which I had just discovered here to try and enhance that dark moody atmosphere Doom 64 is known for. I generated some basic normal maps for the sprites to make the light hit them nice, and gave the enemies some glowing red eyes to make them more visible in the darkness. A trick that “Brutal Doom” inspired. A very “new Doom” effect.

It all came together very nice to make a Doom animation that I feel was more grounded than a lot of interpretations on the source material, but still had the spirit of it. Seems like a lot of people agree considering it’s one of my more popular works.

Original Release Date – December 31st, 2023