Halloween Report: Designers Prepare to Face the Zombie Apocalypse in Armored Trucks

Ride in the Rumble Truck by Alp Germaner to repel the zombie hoard. (Image courtesy of Alp Germaner)

76 on the side panel represents the year Germaner was born; the king crown logo represents, in the designer’s own words, “hardcore survival.” (Image courtesy of Alp Germaner)

Drive for Life by Ozcan Ozaltin is made for a full frontal assault. (Image courtesy of Ozcan Ozaltin.)

Some GrabCAD community members have already begun making preparations for the inevitable arrival of the zombie hoard. Two of them have the same—or very similar—idea: an armored truck to face the End of Days.

Designer Ozcan Ozaltin, a mechantronics engineering student from Erciyes University (Kayseri, Turkey), named his truck Drive for Life. “I’ve using SolidWorks and AutoCAD since 2012,” he said. “I also use KeyShot and Photoview360 for rendering. I used SolidWorks and Photoview360 for my zombie truck. I also used Photoshop CS6 to add blood spatter on the model.”

In a rather anti-climatic note, Ozaltin admitted, “I was just bored and I made the truck.” He observed, “human survivors can drive this truck to stay safe from zombies attacks.” But the blood-stained razor-edged bumper suggests he conceived the truck not merely as a hideout but an assault weapon.

“Material selection was the most challenging part of the design,” Ozaltin recalled, “because I could not decide what to use.” With this project, he pushed his old PC to the limit, creating some performance issues in the machine running Intel Core i7-3537U (2.00GHz), with 8GB RAM.

Designer Alp Germaner, an industrial designer and concept artist from Turkey, dubbed his creation The Rumble Truck. “It’s a zombie-fighting truck with multiple heavy machine gun mounts. This armored front-line fighter baby is conceptualized to protect you with style,” he explained.

If you look closely, you might spot some of his personal markers in the design. “The truck is me,” he said. “The king crown logo represents hardcore survival. 1976 is the year I was born. So 76 also represents me.”

Germaner began modeling with Rhino when he was a university student. “I got a hold of Rhino and kept it as my modeling tool ever since, even to this very day,” he recalled. “I used Rhino to model the truck and Bunkspeed SHOT to render the truck. However, in 95% of my work, I always edit my renderings in Photoshop—cropping the image, changing and enhancing background, and so on.” (Bunkspeed SHOT was acquired by Dassault Systemes and rebranded as SolidWorks Visualization.)

His modeling arsenal is a workstation powered by Intel Core i7-4700MQ  (2.4GHz), with 16MB RAM. He inspects his truck on a dual monitor setup.

He confesses to being a “meat muncher”—not human flesh, just “chicken, fish, and T-bone steaks.” You won’t find him yapping up his work on Twitter. He said he’s “not into social media at all,” because it “takes up too much free time”—time he’d rather spend figuring out how to fend off the zombies.

“I think zombies are real,” he reflected. “People who have lost compassion, love, and emotion are zombies, in my view.”

What ghoulish, macabre gears do you have to protect you from the walking dead? Share below with links and images. To get you started, here’s a STAR-CCM+ Simulation of walking Frankenstein’s Monster, using the new ectoplasmic flow model to predict emissions of supernatural energy/slime in the wake of the monster: