I created this zombie as an asset for my zombie game. I want a creepy enemy that the player had to avoid.

I started by modelling a simple human shape in Blender. This started as a cube, mirrored down the centreline of the body. I roughly extruded arms, legs and a head. I then went in and smoothed out the model and gave it definition around the hands, feet, and face.

For the texturing, I created vertex groups for each of the major body parts and coloured them differently, so I knew which textures I needed. I then went and gathered all the textures. This involved laying all my clothes out flat on the bathroom floor (the best lighting in the house), and taking pictures of them. I also took pictures of my arm and feet for the skin textures. I got a stock photo of a man’s face for the zombie’s head. I then used paint to join textures up where needed, such as putting both sides of the jeans in one image file.

Back in Blender, I linked an Image Texture node to the colour output of the texture. I UV unwrapped the specific parts of the model and lined them up with the important parts of the image, such as lining up the legs with the side seams of the jeans.

Then I created an armature for the zombie with bones for all the major bones in the body. This is then parented to the mesh in a process called skinning, which allows the bones of the armature to move the mesh.

Then I animated the zombie in the animation tab to give him a walk cycle. I positioned his bones in each of the major positions of a walk cycle, such as one foot forward and one foot behind. These are then inserted as key-frames, which can be seen on the dope sheet. The walk cycle is 24 frames long, and the first frame is repeated on from 25 to ensure a smooth repetition of the walk cycle.

The plain photos I used to texture the zombie were very human and lifelike, so after animating the zombie, I went back to editing the textures. I used the Texture Paint section of Blender to add blood detail to the body and a greenish tinge to the skin to make a more zombie appearance.

Currently we have a separate texture for each major part of the zombie, which is not good for Unity. This means all the separate textures need to be baked into one single image. This is done by adding a UV Map to contain all of the images, and then adding UV nodes to all of the materials. We need one UV input node to link the individual image textures to the original UV map, and then we need another node linking the new UV map and the new combined texture file together. Then I highlighted the new texture in all of the materials and baked it to give one texture will all of the details in one place.

Then I imported the zombie into Unity to be used in the game.