The End of The Sun – adventure open world game in Slavic fantasy World
Today we have for You the Halloween update with special making-of material and full 3D Veles’ Tree Model Uploaded to Sketchfab. You could rotate, zoom or even check out every texture now. In addition, we Would Like to Share with You Making off about that tree 3D model.
Tree of Veles 3D model on SketchFab:
3D model for You to watch from every angle is available HERE on Sketchfab or below: https://sketchfab.com/models/1fb0c7b7065449888241e59f31b06f39/embed?autostart=0&ui_controls=1&ui_infos=1&ui_inspector=1&ui_stop=1&ui_watermark=1&ui_watermark_link=1
3D Depth Facebook Haloween Screenshot:
In Addition, we prepared Special 3d interactive Screenshot for Slavic Halloween (Called “Dziady”) You could Watch it on Depthy HERE (Move Mouseover Image there and You will see the Effect)
We posted it on Facebook too so your friends could watch It directly there. Here is that Facebook post, but If You would like to share it on Your own profile not share from our fan page. You could Download that image and that depth map image and just drag and drop to Your Facebook. It will automatically create “3D Photo” from that.
But lets back to the making of and idea for that specific sculpted tree..
…How Halloween is connected to Slavic culture?
In the Slavic tradition, the festival called “Forefathers’ Eve” ( Polish: Dziady ) was celebrated at the same time. (In old days it was celebrated on the autumn equinox) It is a series of rituals and ceremonies celebrated in honour of the ancestors. It’s a day in which souls returned to this world in order to visit their family. It was celebrated in a very Happy way. People were feasting, dancing around bonfires and drinking ( apple juice of course )
Tree of Veles Sketchfab Screenshot
Who is Veles?
Veles is Slavic God of the underworld (or more correct god of afterlife). His attributes are wet, woolly, hairy (bearded), dark and he was associated with cattle, the harvest, wealth, music, magic and trickery. Overall in Slavic culture, Veles God wasn’t seen as pure evil. He was worshipped like a power who care about ancestors in Navia (the afterlife world)
Veles God – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
Unfortunately, some legends say that He was an evil god. But probably because those legends were created in later days when the catholic church changed its (Veles) meaning into a Devil (Maybe Because of Veles’s horns they created a Devil image basing on Veles appearance to show pagan’s Gods as something bad, but it’s just guesswork) This is why We had some dilemma. Overall we think he was both. It depends on point of view. Bad people that were afraid of punishment showed him as evil, but for good people,, Veles was some kind of road to the other side of life.
Tree of Veles Sketchfab Screenshot
The idea of the sculpted tree – Why we put into the game tree with Veles sculpture on it?
The End of The Sun story takes place in four seasons of the year far away in time from each other – “Forefathers’ Eve” takes place in Autumn. This is why at The End of The Sun You will be able to take a part in that festival. ( In some way of course ) Slavic culture is highly connected to nature, so we decided to show it also in that aspect of the game world.
The End of The Sun in-game Screenshot
An old destroyed tree that is already dead but still standing is a perfect place for a sculptor to make some great art on it. That situations of using rest of old trees are very often in Slavic countries. We decided to get that idea and connect it with old beliefs and some dark mystery and create a tree that will be the centre point of The End of The Sun village cemetery (but don’t expect typical cemetery that You know nowadays It will be something totally different but it is topic for a different post)
The Veles Tree design & Making Of:
Why not Photogrammetry?
As some of You know we are using photogrammetry to prepare most of the 3D models in our game but Not everything could be scanned from different reasons. This time reason is that old Slavic sculptures just don’t exist nowadays. Most of them were destroyed by time or people etc. This is why many elements of the game need to be manually created in software. This is the process that we will show right now.
Design Process:
Because Technical process of creation was rather a standard way of creation that many graphic designer use, We just mention that at first, we sculpted 3D high poly model. W didn’t make concept art here. In our case, our concept was our High Poly Mesh. Many Indie studio works this way to make workflow faster.
High Poly Model with almost 20 Millions of triangles. For nowadays PC it is limit for the whole game not only 1 model. So we had to optimize it.
Then we made an optimized version of that model that Unity 3d game engine and any PC could handle.
Optimized 3d model with lower Number of triangles
…and then we baked details from the high poly model to the simpler low poly model.
High Poly and Low Poly + Normal map – Model comparison
We write a lot about 3d models optimizations in our earlier game dev blog posts so You could read about It HERE.
We didn’t make it with Photogrammetry so we have to create whole texture manually. We did it in Substance Painter that is the software that allows working on many layers of textures at the same time.
On Gif below, We recorded layers that we used when making the tree. Simple bark is not enough to give tree natural look. We painted some places with pure wood texture without a bark. This is an old Tree so there is also an additional layer with some devastation, moss etc.
You could see some layers on the Gif below. It could look easy to do but it is a complicated process. We needed a day of work ( about 10 hours ) to Prepare those textures.
Layers Of Veles’ Tree that we made during texturing the model
We decided also to add some claws marks on the tree to give some more mystery here. The bear was animal highly connected to Veles God – this is why bear sculpture is on the other side of the tree.
Claws Mark as one of the details on the tree
Veles’s Tree Sketchfab Screenshot
Nowadays 3d models use much more textures to look better. More than 10 years ago most of the video game 3d models used only base colour and normal map textures. Today Models use many textures to look better and more natural.
The Veles’s Tree 3D model Is created from many textures as:
- Base Color – that is Base Color of Mesh (without any light shadow, specular etc.)
- Normal Map – We mentioned it earlier. It gives the illusion of details and depth.
- Metallic / Roughness map – It gives information where the model should be shiny as metal, and were rough as wood. Different places on the tree have different roughness (even if the tree is not metallic at all)
- Ambient Occlusion – That generates ambient shadows when the model is already in the shadow. Notice that in real-world even objects that are already covered by shadow, still create some darker areas/shadows.
Below you could see some of that textures presented on the 3D model as well as the final result. You could see all of it on your own in Full 3D preview on Sketchfab model.
Textures presented on 3d model
Final Effect & 3D Model on Sketchfab:
Here are screenshots that show the final result. Keep in Mind That on Sketchfab The textures that You could see are compressed to run in web application. Full-Res textures are visible on screenshots below:
And here is the full 3D model on Sketchfab that You could play with!
- Rotate with your mouse drag,
- Zoom with Your mouse scroll
- Move with scroll click and drag
Hope You Like It!
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