Behind the Scenes: The Walking Dead Illustration (Patreon)

I'm trying to catch up with some of my favorite TV shows that I watched in the past, but didn't finish or weren't complete at the time. One of those is The Walking Dead series that finished recently, but it was so long since I watched it, I needed to re-watch all the seasons. 

It's interesting how different your experience can be if you watch something after several years. I remember being outraged quite a lot with the series, because I took it too seriously. Now I watched it from more of a comic book angle, enjoying the different quirky characters and heroic moments and I liked it much more.

I'm almost at the finale and the show took quite a hit from a writing perspective past 2 seasons, but at this point, I need to finish. And overall, I enjoyed the ride, so naturally, I wanted to capture some of my experience in the form of some diorama.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I thought about what would be the iconic scene from the show, and there are quite a lot of those, but most of them are quite large scale. After some time making these kinds of designs, I learned that trying to capture too much of a large scope in isometric view can be counter-productive.

What turned out to worked the best, are small slices of the environment filled with details and hints, that capture the flavor of the inspiration source. When it comes to TWD, I always enjoyed the survival parts, where the group is forced to move and live in the wild, surviving from day to day. And I think it doesn't get better than the camp focused around the iconic Dale's RV. It was the heart of the camp, the light in the darkness, the keystone of the group.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to identify any iconic small-scale scene with the RV. So I took some liberty and searched for the references from the TWD and other post-apo sources alike. Just to gather enough material and decide, what scene to build around the RV, that would be in line, with what the group encounters on the road.

I came up with the small scene with the RV parked next to some abandoned guard post building, with some leftover infrastructure like fence, traffic barriers and cones. As always, I picked up a pencil and tried to sketch out some possible layouts.

I don't like to start 3D from scratch, so I always explore possible versions of the layout on paper first. I came up with a composition of the RV in the back and some of the flavor assets in the foreground, very similar to a room composition with the walls on the far sides.

It's not anything in particular from the show, but combining these elements helps to create a story. It might be a place they stop to scavenge on their way to Washington state, or an abandoned army post they try to search for weapons. The important thing is, the RV in the post-apo environment got recognized immediately by the audience and the composition works.

You can watch the process video on Youtube