[CE3] The Walking Dead Scene

Jack M.

Being a fan of the Walking Dead, I decided to make a scene based on Hershel's farm. I used the house design from the comics as my modeling skills are not quite good enough to tackle modeling the shows house. I then made a scene in the Cryengine 3 sdk (my first) to display it. This is an old project, and I just wanted to get some feedback on the overall designs for the environment for future reference, so I will not be making updates. All crits welcome and I hope you guys enjoy.

Brian "Panda" Choi

I like the lighting. I would forgive the very balanced symmetrical nature of the road if there were some figures involved. If you're compositing 2D images, I'd say add some silhouettes of people to increase the sense of isolation, or create a story with just moving elements. Something as simple as the Hitchiker scene in the last episode of the Walking Dead would work well.

Beyond that . . . I'm not entirely sure how to judge this as a game environment since some things like compositing the house in would sort of kill it unless somehow players were prevented from seeing it at any other angle. But the lighting mostly sells this for me. I'm just more feeling this as fan art than a game environment.

Jeff Parrott

Rework the camera angle. Read:

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/phil_straub_composition_tutorial

The lighting needs to be fixed too. But I'd start with the camera then move onto the lighting. Mimic the lighting colors used in the show.

Jack M.

Yeah, this was mostly fan art (in reference to JadeEyePanda) more so than an environment for a game. Thinking back on it, instead of having the helicopter there I would have much rather had some silhouettes of a couple on top of the hill (or even on the road). Based on the article, I think the helicopter was too much. It created too many focal points and I think the silhouettes would compliment the real focal point (the house) far better. Also the main reason why the image was off balance was because I couldn't at the time figure out how to adjust the captures of photos in the cryengine to get the right aspect ration which I think screwed things up a little for the image.

Thanks for the crits and the article on composition (Jeff Parrott). Composition is something that I haven't done very much of, and I thought honing that skill would really help to sell my environments when I can only get a picture or two in front of somebody.

sziada

Can you please put up some more screen shots of the environment and some renders of the meshes you made.

Jack M.

This was more for learning the cryengine's toolset and thus the only model I actually made myself was the house (in order to increase iteration time). It was very low poly (under a thousand) and the texture I used was a texture mixed with an AO map (1024*1024). I designed the environment only to be seen from the angle that I took the shot from or about that angle, which is why ultimately this scene was never made to be used with the purpose of being played, but is instead mostly fan art. The only reason I'm explaining all of this is because I'm not exactly sure where all of the stuff is for that map. I'll have to do some digging on my computer, but in the mean time I wanted to give some kind of a better explanation of the maps purpose.