Download source Description
A Great Big Tree is a gift for the author's grandpa and everyone who misses him. The author turned the paintings he left behind, and their memories of him, into a world you can step into.
Beginning in a gallery, you wander beneath the trees and along the water's edge in his paintings, find scattered sketches, make your way through the mist and bring every flower into bloom. As you explore, the narration gently unfolds his story, an ordinary yet precious life. Through this gift, the author hopes to let those memories of him linger a little longer.
The game was made in Unity. Before the hackathon the author had modeled the tree and the animals and tried out a simple stylized look; the final rendering approach, all the other models, the pipeline design and the game features were completed during the event. It is provided as source code and needs to be built locally.
How Tripo was used
Every animal and human model in the game was generated with Tripo, which carries most of the pipeline from modeling through rigging and animation.
- Modeling: the author hand-draws concept art, has GPT turn it into part-by-part three-view sheets (animals in one piece; people split into head and body to keep the head's polygon count in check), then generates the models with Tripo's native quad-mesh generation.
- UVs, rigging and animation: after light cleanup and merging, the models go back into Tripo for UV generation, rigging (some seated figures were rigged elsewhere) and animation.
- Finishing: textures are hand-painted, and Codex fixes animation details.
