Brainstorming ideas

[dabu]

Heres a place to start collectively brainstorming ideas.

I would stay away from one off ideas for the time being, like presidents, famous writers, etc...

we want ideas that will work well in a crowd based situation, where you will see the same zombie twice or more at a time. Like a set of British revolutionary war soldiers, salloon gamblers, etc...

[JClark]

I'm not sure who has access to this forum or not, so if anybody didn't see this in my thread here are two ideas. Of course this was before I knew of the cartoon style, but it shouldn't be too hard to modify these. I guess I'll keep designing along the whole pilgrim/indian line, which I guess comes under the "colonial" time frame. Which is pre U.S. but technically american.

[dabu]

nice Jeff, try to come up with a set of 4 designs for each, pilgrim and indian.

they should be similar but also stand out as separate designs...

[gerasimimumu_George]

What are the rules for alphas? Missing limbs?

G

[dabu]

missing limbs are fine, you will want to keep the models simple, as the budget is only 800 - 1000 tris each...

I believe alphas will work, but I would wait to hear from one of the Tall Chair guys....

[gerasimimumu_George]

Word, I'll wait

G

[mr_j_r_]

Hey guys.

Justin here.

For stylizing the zombies. They said Cartoony.

and theres a game called Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys!
(I attach a photo, not a horrible game to play)

and I think we should shoot for BEETLE JUICE the cartoon style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZiIOcvcxqg
opener for beetle juice

[dabu]

nice work, that's pretty close. I think we could gritty it up a tad, compared to the clean animated look of the pic you posted.

[Shon Mitchell]

i dunno, kinda like the idea of the smooth cartoony look, the grit has been done to death, think maybe a more character driven art style could do nicely, have people get focussed on getting these buggers looking interesting, not just awesome

[dabu]

I agree with that, I think theres a balance to be had between completely clean animated versions and super gritty / dirty.

I see the undead as also unclean...

[JClark]

I wouldn't think they want it as clean as that, otherwise why have us use 1024 maps? Even though they might be downsized to 512 later, that's still way more space than what would be needed for a a character that essentially has one solid color for its skin, another for its clothes etc... In other words I don't think they want it looking cel shaded or anything like that.

I'm not sure about gritty, but I think they want to see a fair amount of detail in the texture. (i.e. dirt, stains, tears, boils, etc.)

[dabu]

I'll let Scott speak more to the art style, we'll be getting more involved with the company starting Monday...

In the mean time, you guys can continue to crank out concepts!

[bmilos420]

Here's Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, and George Washington. I'd like to tweak these concepts to fit the style better, and I might swap Jefferson for Franklin, or mby doa fourth Ben Franklin zombie.

I wish the art direction for things like color, and texture could be posted up.....

[DrEvizan]

The art style should definitely be cartoony, and the game definitely calls for grit, otherwise some of the ideas of gameplay would just seem... creepy. For that same reason we want to avoid overgritting everything, especially since we want all zombies to be distinguishable from a distance, or when they are shambling in a horde. Simply put, solid color - no, but exaggerated proportions, and simplified textures - yes. I hope this helps, I will try to post more style-guide stuff soon.

[Scott_TallChair]

Hello,

Doug is right on, and the sketch in the above post from Doug is a pretty good example of the level of detail we are looking for, balanced against the clean lines and exaggerated proportions of the cartoon style.

The Beetlejuice example mentioned above is pretty close, but rather than just one color for each major sculptural element think about having an average of 3 colors - the base color, some dirt or grit, and some wear. As long as it's kept nice and simple it will read from any distance and look great. Again I refer you to Doug's colored concept above for an example. The colors could stand to be a little more saturated, but the forms and level of grit vs. cleanliness is perfect.

I have started a questions thread to sort of collect all of the questions in one place to make answers easier to find, but I will also try to stay on top of as many questions as I can.

While it is possible to do alphas on an iPhone, we are choosing not to for the zombies for this product because of the resources that it calls - a single alpha'd character on screen uses up the resources that could go towards putting an additional 3 or 4 more zombies on screen, and I'd rather have more zombies so we're skipping the alphas on these guys.