Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop

Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop was a custom animation and paint program created by John Carmack as a utility during the development of Doom. It allowed capturing and digitally manipulating video shots of three-dimensional objects.

This program was initially used by Adrian Carmack to capture the eight needed rotation frames of his hand-sculpted clay models. The model would be placed inside a brightly lit white box on a rotating modeling stand and then captured through video into the program. The resulting images were "distorted," and in substantial need of touch-ups. When the clay modeling process proved too slow to be practical, the program still proved itself useful for capturing images of the metal-and-latex miniatures created by Gregor Punchatz. Other items captured included shots of Kevin Cloud wielding various plastic toy guns which became the basis of Doom's weapons, Tom Hall's girlfriend's Eager Beaver chainsaw, a pair of snake skin boots, and a bloody scab on Kevin's knee - the latter two became parts of various wall textures.

Very little is known about the program's interface, as neither its executable nor its source code have ever been released. John Romero has stated that the tool was used to take captured images "from 24-bit color down to a 256-color VGA paletted graphic". This description implied that it was an intermediate tool, likely written in for ; most PCs at the time lacked support for true color graphics. Screenshots of DoomEd released later confirmed most of this, as several members of id Software can be seen to have kept the program's icon on their NeXTStep systems' desktops. Doom's artists (Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud) did most of their work in Deluxe Paint II for DOS.

Trivia

 * According to Romero, the icon for Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop was a picture of the from the children's television program .