The Walking Dead: Crafting a Stylized World for the Mature Franchise

[Music] all right hello my name is jonathan banks i'm an environment artist with telltale games thank you all very much for coming to this session today i just wanted to remind a few of you right now that we don't want to record anything and also to fill out your evaluations after this that would be great so i work for telltale games i've been there for about four years now and i helped to find the visual art style for the walking dead best world for the mature franchise so how many of you have uh played the walking dead game so far awesome very cool uh for those of you who haven't i'm going to start by showing a trailer that showcases the visual art style we achieved rated m for mature message one oh my god finally i don't know if you tried to reach us all the calls are getting dropped

i want my parents to come home now i think that might be a little while he's bitten we gotta throw him up i'm gonna kill him cat you want to get violent old [ __ ] well come on i don't know who you are what you did but you better become a better liar [Music] all right so today i'm going to be talking about the art of the walking dead and the approach we at telltale took to make it happen the walking dead ip is about survivors living in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse

it's originally a comic created by robert kirkman with illustrated works by tony moore and charlie adlard telltale's the walking dead it's based on the comic book universe so typically most post-apocalyptic games on the market are gritty and realistic if you look up zombie game or zombie apocalypse online you get something like this with the exception of plants versus zombies it all looks pretty much the same the imagery is bleak desaturated and muted before the walking dead telltale is a company best known for comical lighthearted adventure games such as tales of monkey island sam and max puzzle agent and back to the future so going going from games like these to the walking dead was a difficult task so how did we do it pre-production the general consensus during pre-production was that we wanted to create a unique looking game that was familiar to the comics but also

had that strong illustrated style seen in most telltale titles looking at the comic we're inspired by its bold compositions and classic comic book art style we really felt that the hand-painted textures and stylistic lighting would be a really good fit for this franchise inspired a few quick concepts were made these were some of the only concepts made during pre-production to move the production forward we decided to create a 3d environment based on one of these concepts we used the more concept as seen here because it visually represented what we were looking to achieve and was the most graphic the end result was this this art stayed true to the illustrated concept drew inspiration from the comic and worked well within the telltale engine

this art inspired the team and excited the company most importantly it moved the production forward at the time i was working on jurassic park and puzzle agent so i did a lot of this during my lunch break this is one of the first pieces of art that was created for the game the fundamental techniques that were used to create the environment art were then passed on to the character department in order to create our first zombie sharing and evolving the artistic process utilized by both the character and environment art allowed us to create a cohesive world that fully immersed the player this is really important to me i really wanted all assets to really seamlessly fit together after showing this work to robert kirkman he was super enthusiastic with what we are doing and excited with a few assets to work with our cinematics and design department put together the following prototype

someone else is here oh thank god you didn't leave them to us did you no no i don't think so look we need help here she's having a baby wait a minute where'd you come from i was looking for medical supplies uh this guy in my camp he [ __ ] behind you maybe they didn't hear that so i hope one day you'll be able to see that whole prototype uh with it in its entirety without it being cut down but one thing we learned from that was that we could tell a mature and engaging story with stylized art we also learned that the environments and the characters fit cohesively together the art process

every major element in the game started with a concept this included both character art environment art these illustrated works would then be translated into 3d so you can really see how true we stayed to these concepts we really tried to recreate what we saw this was the first screenshot we ended up sending out to the public it was during comic con and i was a little bit nervous at first i wasn't too sure how the public was going to respond to this but it was insanely positive in fact i didn't see one negative comment the only thing i saw was people started complaining about the banner ads that had surrounded the articles so with this positive response it was really inspiring to us we knew we had created a unique and beautiful world that got people excited and wanting to see more in some cases there really just wasn't time for a concept so we looked to the comic for inspiration herschel's farm was an example of an environment that we did not get a concept for at first

so we looked uh to the to the to the comic this is a scan from the comic and you can see how uh it was recreated in 3d it stayed stayed really true and even though we didn't have a concept at first for this environment we still were able to create something really beautiful breaking down the art for further the following techniques provided solutions for visually striking real-time art these included handcrafted line work colorful textures and atmospheric lighting handcrafted line work working on the puzzle agent series and having developed the 2d techniques used to create graham animals unique style in 3d i wanted to take a similar approach to the art creation for the walking dead in puzzle agent all linework was painted directly onto textures and then applied to models no procedural techniques were used so this was all done in 3d

and looking at what we learned from this we were able to apply it to the walking dead so as you can see here the linework is painted directly onto the models and i hope these turntables really show you what handcrafted linework looks like we kept our line work loose because it more closely resembled out of the comic and can be easily adapted by all artists in the studio so this is how it's applied to characters and you can see how it's also applied to environments as well later into production we got a new shader that showed what procedural line work and shading looked like however it felt too computerized and took away from the player being completely immersed in the walking dead universe therefore we decided not to use it now i thought that was a really good approach but um lately we've actually had a little bit of time to uh experiment we took

basically the best of the walking dead and we took our procedural shader and with you can see right here we just released this yesterday this is our new franchise that we're developing and the reason i'm showing this is because everything we do at telltale is really an evolution of what we've learned from our past products so working on various projects like puzzle agent jurassic park really learned a lot about the art style for that that was also applied to the walking dead and you can see where we're taking it now but that's the future colorful textures unlike the flat colors and puzzle agent the walking dead really needed to have a another dimension to its palette so as you can see from these textures there's an incredible amount of saturation and detail there's also what i'd like to call crafted imperfection into each of one of these textures and that's really because the walking dead deals with imperfect characters with imperfect pass placed in imperfect situations so we wanted to reflect a little bit that in our textures you can see how it's applied to one-offs

and also characters so breaking down some of these textures even further you can see first we use illustrative techniques to really define highlights and shadows we kept this very loose then we would add color variation by overlaying overlaying watercolor textures or just painting this directly into the maps and then of course adding line work as you can see when it all comes together in an in-game screenshot it really helped our model shine atmospheric lighting so one of the most important techniques that glued the entire canvas together was atmospheric lighting using the cinematic lighting techniques we learned in making jurassic park we pushed it even further with the walking dead really jurassic park was the first game where we explored cinematic drama and we took what we learned from that and applied it to the walking dead so as you can see here there's an incredible amount of mood and atmosphere

with the lighting we have bold use of silhouettes that really give our lighting a new water look to it there's a lot of high contrast in here you can see how it's applied to some of our other scenes really lighting where we wanted the player to focus their attention so we wanted every game every scene in the game to be unique therefore we created color key concept art that could be effectively translated by our 3d artists this is also a really great way to see where an episode was progressing through color and as you can see if you take one of these color scripts and blow it up you get something like this and now you can see how it be translated in 3d you can see how how close we came to reproducing some of these color keys so breaking down a few of these scenes even further this is just a scene with models and textures

then we would light it based on color key concept art you can really see just what lighting does to a scene there's incredible incredible amount of mood already and then once after effects and final art direction were involved so we didn't have too much after effects to work with basically what you're seeing here is the addition of depth fog and a color overlay to help basically pull together some of the colors we also had used alpha flats in order to showcase glows or light beams and here's the motoring just models and textures once it's lit and then with after effects and final art direction and one of my favorite scenes st john's dairy in some cases you can see some of these textures are gray we ended up colorizing them in the engine with lighting

and then with fog after effects and final art direction so you can see there's a tremendous amount of mood and atmosphere that we were able to put into our scenes just with lighting technical constraints so in order to ship on a wide range of platforms the following technical limitations were imposed environments had a modeling budget of 30 thousand verts this was so we could add more characters on screen a big part of the walking dead is the characters but we didn't want the environments to be bare or flat so basically what we did is we resorted to low polygon modeling techniques and used camera facing flats where appropriate at first we had screen based ambient occlusion but that was removed so we ended up baking that into the light maps vertex lighting replaced per pixel lighting as i went over earlier we had limited post processing effects hdr was removed and we had reduced lights map sizes this was the big this i think had the biggest impact on the game

basically we had a new compression algorithm and our light maps basically went from being very sharp and graphic to a little bit soft however we didn't let this get to us we really just focused on what with the resources we had and we were still able to create some really beautiful art this was further um we had our first play test and the art received basically some of the highest scores production so um we ended up creating these style guides in order to keep the art consistent and production efficient this is really a great way to provide new artists tutorials on how to adapt to the art style and within these tutorials it showed how within these style guides it showed how to create textures outline modeling constraints and include brushes that could basically be easily shared throughout the entire art department in some cases um there were some tutorials that basically showed how to

create assets very quickly you could use this train as an example right here once it was modeled linework could be easily applied to it and then we could throw on a few base textures and move it down through the production pipeline later if time permitted we could basically paint over these with a polish pass as you can see the train now has gone through a polished pass it has increased contrast weathering and details so the information in these style guides really allowed for quick iterations and the rapid creation of assets because of this the art could be iterated upon when changes the story occurred without severely affecting the production schedule this was critical in order to give our writers the freedom they needed to tell the story they wanted to tell and the time that was given to them so in about a year and a half we created 78 environments 45 characters 2 316 textures

275 objects 77 effects and a zombie factory at one point the entire company worked on the project but the core development team that created the majority of this art consisted of about six artists the final product using the resources available to us and embracing our constraints we created art that successfully aided in the telling of a mature story by merging the look of the comic with telltale's familiar illustrative style we created a beautiful and commercially successful zombie apocalypse if there's one thing i learned from working on the walking dead it's this trust in what you do best as a studio and let that shine through the product thank you [Applause] and we have time for questions so if

anyone has any feel free to ask um great work uh really love it and i had a question you commented a little bit about um kind of how the the final 3d environments were really driven so much by the concept art the style of the concept art could you talk a little bit more about if there were other areas where the concept art team was interacting with the the modeling team and the texturing team because it almost seems like as opposed to normally when there's a painting and it might translate to photorealistic textures here it seemed like there was a lot more overlap there definitely was and even in some cases we would actually they would actually create concepts based on what we had gray boxed um at times you know they would actually fill us in with a few textures they'd come up with some ideas and that was really cool we could kind of bounce bounce off each of each other in order to create some really beautiful work

great thanks one of the things i loved about the game was that the characters were very stylized but still very emotionally expressive which i think you know really contributed to how emotionally mature and dramatic the game was and how much everyone liked it can you speak to sort of using those very stylized stylized faces to convey these very heavy and serious emotions that we're maybe not used to seeing in characters that don't look very real so that's been something that telltale's been working on since it started is really creating great characters with a lot of emotion and that's really what we invest a lot of our technology into so what do you do well there's you know there's basically they are able to create um style guides that showcase various emotions um and it's really not my department as far as how that is acting acted out but it's pretty cool what we're able to do at the company uh when you were creating the art i've

never tried to do a visual style like that which maps do you use do you it was that all diffuse only and then the line yeah so we didn't use any normal maps it was all diffuse space no specular maps uh basic lambert shading wow yeah very cool thanks uh where will you be this sunday night um i've got a date actually so yeah good choice hi uh you briefly mentioned how uh why everyone's looking at me um you briefly mentioned how as the episodes would progress there would be a color progression are there any other ways that you

progressed at how the story and the place in the story uh not the physical location but like the temporal element of the story like where the story is progressing and how the characters are feeling like how that plays into the environment uh can you repeat the question again so yeah so how does and what ways does the tone of the story affect the environment in other ways other than just the color progression in the episode okay yeah so um i showed a slide earlier that was like this the slaughterhouse right in the back of the barn yeah and so you know we it wasn't like we we would basically that's a scene that we really wanted to be scary so we added a lot more mood into that and that was reflected really in the concept so basically the concept artists would basically see um what was going on with the story they would get a pitch from there then they would be basically be able to you know do what they do best and concept some art out you know should have a lot of mood to it where you see sometimes like um in

st john's dairy you could see that there wasn't you know that it was just in daytime and you could see how that progressed as the night came we had a lot of rain and atmosphere and in some cases that was just it just evolved that way i know when we were first making uh that specific scene it wasn't going to be rain it wasn't going to have any rain or any lightning or anything like that but as we started making the game we saw that that was just going to add to a lot it was going to add to the scene if we added all that contrast in there thank you yeah hi uh you mentioned earlier um that you the art is based off of the comics but um i wanted to know did you take anything either during the project or personally from the show at all like well while making the um environments we looked at the whole uh the whole ip okay cool and there was also a few other things we looked at i'm just not allowed to talk about them all right thank you but i love the yeah the whole series is amazing so

hi so my question is a bit about uh the modularity i guess so like i saw that the i play the game in the environments they do they look like really really good and really and different and i noticed that the colors change a lot so i want to know like did you guys reuse many things because i know since most of the the things were in the textures like the other guys question asked did you guys reuse a lot of the props or was it totally unique because the the environments they do look you can really feel the difference in the pacing so uh yes uh the question was do we reuse anything right okay and yes we do uh the trick is uh to not make it look that way and uh i would say that lighting played an integral part with that um you know one thing that i did was actually create an asset library and that was that you could easily see you know most engines have this basically uh where you can you have all your different assets and you can easily populate a scene and that was really actually really helpful with uh for everything we were doing especially once we reached like episode four and

five and we you know kind of our schedule got crunched and so really setting up some of these techniques that we could create uh environments and scenes really quickly was essential and then using you know some we had some a little bit of tech where we could take textures and shift the color around and then of course with lighting it's amazing what you can do with lighting to cover a lot of that up okay cool thanks yeah speaking of lighting could you tell us how many lights you needed on average in a scene and what kind so um well we had perf per vertex lighting but that was all real timelines uh prime and that was mainly on the characters for environments specifically we could use any an astronomical number basically because it was all baked lighting uh we did use ambient occlusion as well when appropriate so it didn't really matter when it came to bake lighting in some cases we were able to override some of the some of the baked lighting with real-time lighting and that's usually about four point lights that we have access to

sometimes less depends on if it ships on like iphone or not yeah all right is that it thank you all for coming really appreciate it