Skip to main content

Shopping in the Zombie Apocalypse | Digital Illustration

zombie apocalypse supply gathering


Shopping in the zombie apocalypse, this is a concept piece I did about a year ago now.  Like many people out there I also enjoy the idea of a good old fashioned zombie apocalyptic world.  It would be utterly horrifying to be faced with the idea of being eaten alive by a pack of rotting blood thirsty living dead.  But, who wouldn't want to explore the world after people?  With all the places to explore it would feel like being on a different planet.  For me it goes into that child hood fantasy of wanting to spend the night in the mall with all of the stores open and you, just for one night can do whatever you wanted too!  That would be AWESOME!  Maybe that is one of the reason I love working on environments so much.  It becomes very easy to get lost in the idea and emotions of what you are trying to have the viewer feel.


My first thought when approaching this image was thinking about simple normal parts of every day life and what those might look like in the zombie apocalypse.  We all have to go shopping so I thought, "hey what would shopping in the zombie apocalypse look like?".  The entire time working on the piece I just kept thinking about what it would actually be like to live in this world and walk around in this space.  Once that thinking was in mind everything started to fall into place fairly quickly.  One of the things to help keep pieces like this moving fast enough to keep me excited is by using photo scrap to help quickly drop in the ideas as they come and then painting over and tweaking them as the image progresses.  I used tons of photo scrap and a few 3D elements for this piece.  The body on the right side of the screen and the foreground character were 3D models I posed in DAZ Studio and painted over.  I don't really mind the stigma that comes from working in this manner since its all about enjoying the work and getting a piece finished with all the ideas in place.  When all is said and done I'm very happy with this piece.  It invokes the idea I wanted it to and thats pretty much the goal.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Level Buddy | Blender Addon

An old-school CSG inspired level editor add-on for Blender 3D. The add-on is still very much a work in progress but fairly solid for blocking spaces super quickly.  Just because graphic fidelity has gotten insanely good and hyper detailed doesn't mean we shouldn't look back how older games were put together, at least that is my opinion.  One thing I always come back to is how quickly the tools in the first 2 versions of Unreal Ed 2 and Doom level editors allowed anyone to block out a level, iterate on feedback or try an idea out.  So I just took some time to put together a similar pipeline right in my 3d package of choice.  I wanted to keep it simple and quick to try out level design ideas.  You can use it for simple white boxing of your level, break it up into multiple static meshes and import them into your game engine of choice or  you can use that as your starting point to start more detailed modeling ....

Mega Cow | Video Game Mockup

We All Have Crazy Game Ideas...This Is Just One Of My Own Yup its a giant mutant cow... Using Inkscape I made this game mockup after watching some MST3K late one night.  I thought it would be fun to play a game where you were the giant creature causing all of the destruction.  That is the reason the giant cow is on the right of the screen instead of the left. The player would move through the level from the right to the left, the opposite of pretty much every scrolling game... looks good in my head but might not work in actual game play.  Below are some images showing the progression from rough sketch to final mock-up.

Rocky Terrain | Blender Internal Rendering

I saw a really awesome render of some rocks the other day and was inspired to see if I could recreate a version of my own of some rocky terrain so I made this little scene.  The scene was modled, rendered and composited in Blender 3D .  It is a very simple scene and made just for fun in a couple of hours.  The rocks are all subsurface cube objects that I run a noise displacement map on using the world coordinates.  This allowed me to just make instances of the cube and drag them around the scene to get different rock shapes.  Some of the rocks needed to be scaled to get some more size variation but that is pretty much the only thing that is different about them other then their positions.  It was actually really fun to just move the cube around the scene and watch these random rock shapes form.  After the layout was done I added in some particle grass to break the ground up.  Not enough time was spent on the grass so it looks pretty bad ...