Direction · 2 of 7
Everything with identity is born in Tripo Studio; what's heavy is the raw HD, and it never goes into the game.
Since September 26, 2026, Tripo mode has been the master line for 3D assets. Houses, named trees, characters, items, furniture and animals come from Tripo Studio; the engine remains responsible for whatever has to follow the map (terrain, streets, rivers, sea) and for the repeated mass in MultiMesh (distant woods, grass). An alternative, fully procedural visual style stayed in the game only for comparison and received no further artistic investment; it left in Build 11 (October 10, 2026), and today the valley is Tripo only.
The workflow is short and always the same: an image reference in the game's style, generation in HD Model (H3.1), retopology with Tripo's own Smart Mesh (quads, from 500 to 10,000 polygons), GLB export with the budgeted texture size, one line in the catalog and the provenance record. It costs about 95 credits per finished asset; the bottleneck is human curation, not credits. The real risk isn't weight, it's collage: three different styles in the same square.
3D art and the Tripo workflow
Everything with identity is born in Tripo Studio; what's heavy is the raw HD, and it never goes into the game.
Since September 26, 2026, Tripo mode has been the master line for 3D assets. Houses, named trees, characters, items, furniture and animals come from Tripo Studio; the engine remains responsible for whatever has to follow the map (terrain, streets, rivers, sea) and for the repeated mass in MultiMesh (distant woods, grass). An alternative, fully procedural visual style stayed in the game only for comparison and received no further artistic investment; it left in Build 11 (October 10, 2026), and today the valley is Tripo only.
The workflow is short and always the same: an image reference in the game's style, generation in HD Model (H3.1), retopology with Tripo's own Smart Mesh (quads, from 500 to 10,000 polygons), GLB export with the budgeted texture size, one line in the catalog and the provenance record. It costs about 95 credits per finished asset; the bottleneck is human curation, not credits. The real risk isn't weight, it's collage: three different styles in the same square.
10 principles
What is not negotiable
The valley is Tripo only; the procedural is gone
Everything that has an identity (houses, named trees, characters, items, furniture, animals) comes from Tripo Studio. The engine makes terrain, streets, rivers, sea and the repeated mass in MultiMesh. The procedural style was an initial test, with no new art; Build 11 (October 10, 2026) removed it in a task of its own, with gates: the style option in SETTINGS, the character, the flora and the code-made buildings are gone. A missing GLB is now an error in the log, not a code-made drawing in its place.
Raw HD doesn't go in: HD Model → Smart Mesh → GLB
Each generation arrives with ~1.9 million triangles and three 2K textures — film quality, not game quality. Tripo's own retopology (Smart Mesh, quads) solves it and turned out better than any external reduction: the same mango tree at 560 triangles (the procedural version, with no identity, which left the game on October 10), 144,564 (HD reduced by script, jagged leaves and UV cracks) and 20,453 (Smart Mesh at 10,000 quads, clean and nearly identical to the HD). The reduzir_glb.py script was discontinued and no new asset goes through it.
Reference before generating
Image → 3D from a reference in the game's style is preferred; text → 3D is for drafts. The reference describes the asset in isolation (species or object, shape, materials, distinguishing features), frames the whole object in three-quarter view with margin, has a truly transparent background — including between branches and leaves — soft light and crisp edges; one reference per object. Alongside the image goes a reconstruction brief with deliverable, geometry, fidelity and budget. The prompt always ends with "isolated object, no ground plane, no text".
Budget by type, 1K for everything small
Video memory comes from textures, not triangles: each GLB carries color, normal and metal/roughness. Landmark building 8,000–10,000 polygons and 2K; ordinary house, pier and bridge 4,000–6,000 and 2K; named tree 6,000–10,000 and 2K; forest tree 800–2,000 and 1K; small prop 1,000–3,000 and 1K; handheld item 500–1,500 and 1K; rigged character 6,000–10,000 and 2K. Never 8K in the game (8K is only for promotional renders). Instancing the same GLB many times is cheap; having many different GLBs in the scene is what costs.
Style coherence over weight
The real risk is collage. To avoid it: always generate the image reference with the same style bible, ask for "stylized game prop, clean silhouette, soft even lighting" and review each piece next to its neighbors before promoting it.
The catalog is the only way in
catalogo_assets.gd is the only place that knows each GLB's path, the measurement used to normalize it (height or width) and its collision (trunk or box). A new piece is one line in PECAS plus the GLB at assets/prototipo_3d/<pasta>/<chave>_tripo.glb; a GLB is never instanced outside the catalog. Collision is always made by hand, with simple shapes. A piece not yet exported prints a warning and stays absent — and the game keeps going.
Provenance, license and Git LFS
Each piece records its Tripo task, face count, texture resolution and prompt in the folder's ORIGEM.md and in CREDITOS.md. The raw HD stays in .assets-raw/tripo/, outside Git; the final GLB goes in via Git LFS. The Max plan grants commercial use and private models; confirm with support whether the license for generated models remains valid after canceling the subscription before publishing the game.
Characters: T-pose, Auto Rig and in-place clips
Characters are generated in T-pose, rigged in the Studio (humanoid Auto Rig, 65-bone Mixamo skeleton, 20 credits) and receive preset animations (idle, walk, run, greet_01, agree, look_around, wave_goodbye_02; the traveler also gets chop, afraid, fold_arms and swim), exported with the skeleton and with in-place animation. The CharacterBody3D controls movement and collisions; the clips only move the skeleton. The numeric suffix Tripo adds to clips is stripped by the animator, and a GLB without clips is an error to fix: there is no longer a code-made animator in its place.
2D art is the reference, not the product
A 3D asset is never replaced with 2D art, and anything that exists only in 2D becomes a 3D model: 44 pieces, from the bed to the farm manor, with the 2D sprite serving as Tripo's reference image — that is how the Casa de Carro Quebrado began. No system waits for a model: combat began with a temporary peccary and now uses the animated Tripo model, added later through one catalog entry without changing the system.
The batch that populated the village
On October 5, fourteen villagers arrived with rigs and clips, along with domestic and woodland animals, fish and rays, houses, plants, props and lightweight tree versions. The traveler received an animated Tripo body, and items were realigned to that body's hand bone. Origins and credits remain recorded by folder.
9 rules
In practice, day to day
- Generate with HD Model (H3.1, Max quality, 8K texture off): 55 credits; Remesh → Retopology (Quad, Smart Mesh): 40 credits; GLB export is free. Cost per finished asset: ~95 credits (≈ 230 assets per month on the Max plan).
- Large batches go through the Studio console, repeating the interface's own calls in the logged-in session; the script neither prints nor stores the token, and the tab must stay visible because Chrome holds back downloads from hidden tabs.
- From download to game: sincronizar_downloads.py (Downloads → assets/prototipo_3d/<pasta>/, ignoring files over 25 MB), medir_glb.py (bounding box, triangles and images of each GLB) and registrar_origem.py.
- Every Tripo model arrives with its longest axis at 0.98: choose 'altura' (height) for what is tall and thin and 'largura' (width) for what lies flat. Corrections available in the catalog: 'girar' (degrees), 'afundar' (the pier comes with pilings and needs to sink into the water) and 'piso' (height of the walkable planking on pier and bridge).
- Textures are imported VRAM-compressed (project.godot: importer_defaults texture = VRAM Compressed); interface textures are marked Lossless in the .import. When replacing a GLB, delete the old textures' .import files and let Godot reimport.
- Format limits: the model is a closed shell (you can't walk into a Tripo house; interiors are a separate scene); foliage is a solid mesh (wind and water are the engine's job); lighting is sometimes baked into the texture (pick the most neutral variant).
- Inspect the mesh by rotating it: front, sides, back, top and bottom; look for zero-thickness planes, floating parts, holes, blurry texture and bits of background. A good front view doesn't prove the whole model is good.
- Each batch is approved before it runs: generation consumes credits, and the cost shown by the interface goes into the conversation before the click.
- Check the piece's scale, collision and name in the game, next to its neighbors, before committing.
Where it shows up
- mangueira_tripo.glb
The case that settled the workflow: 1.9 M triangles in the raw HD → 20,453 in Smart Mesh at 10,000 quads, nearly identical to the HD. It's the largest model in the catalog. - casa_carro_quebrado_tripo.glb
The first integrated piece (09/24/2026): a clean 3/4 reference created from a supplied image, 65 credits on H3.1, exported with 2K textures; from 64.8 MB and 1,915,732 triangles down to 13 MB and 273,548 in the game version, with width adjusted to 5.2 m, base resting on the terrain and box collision. - pau_brasil_tripo.glb
The first reference had a gray background and a studio shadow, and Tripo incorporated the background as a disc under the tree and slabs behind the canopy; the reference with real transparency produced a cleaner mesh (~74 thousand triangles, 2K texture). - The 09/26/2026 batch
Sixty-six pieces retopologized and exported through the Studio console in one day (67 retopologies, one generation and one rig: 2,755 credits). With 67 models, importing without compression pushed video memory to 2.49 GB; with VRAM Compressed, 735 MB at 60 FPS. - pedro_tripo.glb and the villagers
The editorial catalog brings together the characters, including the traveler and master Quirino. Triangles, bones and clips are measured in each model's GLB; export to the site preserves the rig and animations. - igreja_tripo.glb and the shoreline
The church of Bom Jesus, the beach rocks, the tropical almond trees and the boats (awning boat, yellow canoe) came from photos of the real place and were set on the right KML landmarks; the generic chapel became the "Old chapel", moved off to the lookout street. - The whole catalog
The catalog brings together characters, buildings, trees, props, items, furniture, animals and fish, including lightweight variants for distance. Cards show dimensions, triangles, textures, bones and clips; current counts and sizes are in the project's statistics.
Where it comes from
The documents behind this area
- Assets with Tripo — the official 3D model workflow
- Image for a 3D model — how to prepare an asset's reference
- Development history — the steps before the standalone repository
- 3D prototype decisions — what was decided and when
- The living valley — day and night, residents and the valley's sound
- How to play — save slots, controls and screens
- Origin of each model — each asset's production record
- Asset credits — authorship and source of each piece