Phantom Culprit: The Characters

The Player

Creating my player character was a tough part of the design as I feel the character choice should reflect on the gameplay and story. Do I want a super trained solider with a machine gun to mow down zombies or do I want a rookie police officer armed with a basic weapon and no training with it. The latter was my choice. This fits in with the gameplay I wanted, a weak weapon and tough to kill enemies.

The character went through a few design choices but was settled to look like someone with little training who was not fully prepared for the situation but had adapted quickly. To show this I designed a character in normal every day clothing but with equipment they found very shortly after the zombie outbreak. This includes the torch, weapon holster and the handgun. (See the next post for the design process).

The Zombies

Every great zombie game needs some scary looking zombies. Seeing as the game would be set in a police station it makes sense most zombies would be former police officers. Obviously I couldn't create a lot of different meshes and characters for this project so I went for 3 police officers and 1 civilian zombie design. The zombies, like the player character, were designed in Adobe Fuse but then edited with Substance Painter to added extra gore and blood.

The zombie mesh in Unreal Engine wit the added blood and gore from Substance Painter.

To make every zombie encounter different and to add to the zombie gore I created a very basic dismemberment system. This can be triggered once a zombies health reaches a set threshold and the zombie is shot in the right area. Once these requirements are met the zombies head can explode or their arm fall off. These effects are achieved by hiding the bone name and firing a particle system representing blood splatter.

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Phantom Culprit: Character Creation

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Tools To create my characters I used a mix of Adobe Fuse, Substance Painter and Maya. Each tool respectively allows me to create their models, textures and animation. Adobe Fuse Adobe Fuse is a free character mesh builder that allows for users to start off with a basic array of body parts. These can then be edited with finer precision and then equipped with clothes and accessories.  Adobe Fuse also rigs the characters with a skeleton which can then be used for animations. Rigged meshes can be exported to Adobe Mixamo for some quick, pre-made animations which I used for my characters walking and zombie attack animations. My main character in Adobe Fuse. Substance Painter Substance painter, a material editor as mentioned in the previous post, allows me to add finer details to my characters and meshes. I used it to add more gore to my zombies but to also create high quality textures for a few props such as the ammo boxes which can be found in the game. The hand...
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