Or at least according to the premise of new gaming application, Culture Warz. These zombies have taken over the world and only Chad can rid the world of them. Samsara GS have had the privilege of helping design the zombie characters for the game which was a great creative experience and a great chance to test out the development tools provided by Blender and Adobe Substance Painter. Blender does come at a very good price for professional modelling, sculpting, texture painting, rigging, animating, rendering and compositing.
Culture Warz was developed by indie studio Rear Admiral and built using the Unity engine. Model and texture assets were exported with ease by both Blender and Substance, straight into Unity. The original meshes were optimized and UV flattened ready for texturing.
Texturing in Substance followed a strict sequence of stages for all characters to keep a consistent look i.e the standard substances for mesh parts, an ambient occlusion layer for entire mesh, a highlights layer for entire mesh followed by a lowlights layer and any decals. Skin colour is the exact hex code for all characters again to help with a consistent look.
A physically based rendering pipeline is used as usual to give the best lighting and surface quality. Roughness, Metallic, Base Colour and Normal / Height maps used. Ambient occlusion is baked into the maps in Substance Painter. When exporting maps to Unity the Base Colour is called Albedo with a glossiness map in the alpha channel.
This shader setup works great in Cycles using a HDRI environment map. A greyscale height map works well with the ‘Bump’ node plugged into the normal shader slot, but if you want to use the actual normal map in the ‘Texture Image’ node then make sure you have ‘Non Colour’ selected in the ‘Colour Space’ field.
One cool technique I learnt on this project was how to achieve realistic hair with low poly mesh suitable for a gaming application. This mesh is extruded from splines styled using blender hair particles and textured with hair artwork with an alpha channel.
Culture Warz is available for PC on Steam and for Android on Google Play
