What’s in a texture?

I have been working on creating a great zombie hoard in Firedrake. The underlining story line is that the Necro-Mages of Ozmot are abducting local villagers and harvesting their skeletons to create their dreaded undead army. Throughout the game, the villagers go through a process of being turned into 1) fresh zombies… 2) rotten zombies… 3) skeletons.

So, I need a few models to create a great zombie hoard and more importantly a few different textures on the various zombie models. I have two zombie models ready, one for the fresh zombie and one for the more rotten zombies. I have ten different textures for the rotten zombie, but I need to work on the fresh zombie a bit.

Currently, the two don’t look like they are actually a progression from one to the other. I had the “fresh” zombie lying about from some Unity store asset package and did a bit of blender modeling to create the “rotten” zombie. But the textures look and feel don’t match at all and the two models don’t fit well together. It breaks the immersion of the VR experience I think.

I originally thought I would only use one zombie model with an array of different animation to take advantage of Unity’s Dynamic Batching option. I thought I could save some draw calls doing this and really optimize the overall app for Mobile VR, but alas…. I could never really get it to work correctly.

Ultimately, I decided to use different zombies with completely different textures and animation and A.I. settings to really add some variety in the hoard and then just limit the number on screen at any one time. Luckily the Oculus GO, seems to handle 6 or so on screen at one time, enough for some fun zombie chop’en action.

So, off to photoshop to try and “normalize” the two.

Image #1 shows the two zombies side by side.

You can easily see that the look of each monster, don’t really match. The models clock in at about 900-1000 vertices, so they are great for mobile VR.

Image #2

After working in Photoshop on the “fresh” zombie texture, the two are starting to look a bit more in-line together. I am starting to like the flow of the zombies now. There are over 20 different zombie animations, 8 different attack animations 20 different sounds and now about 15 different textures I can apply to these two different zombie models.. So between all that, I think I can get some SERIOUS variation to the great zombie hoard!

Image #3

A shot of the rotten zombie with two different textures.

Image #4

The texture file in question. This is a UV texture mapping of the 3d model. Tricky to edit after you have backed the UV’s….