An immersive Halloween experience inside Decentraland – filled with art, optical, tasty and spooky surprises.
The Tiger's Cave is a Decentraland event scene designed to test and showcase some of the new SDK7 features like lights and PBR textures. The idea was to create an underground cave experience combined with a spooky Halloween theme.
Notice: as the DCL 3rd person shoulder camera - which is default - is not very reliable inside the cave it's a good idea to switch inside the cave to 1st person camera (simply scroll your mouse wheel up for that).
This is also METATIGER's second entry for the "DCL Regenesis Labs Vibe Coding Hackathon" https://dorahacks.io/hackathon/dcl-bring-your-vibe/detail
If you have the Decentraland Client installed simply type "/world tigerscave" in the chatbox to visit it 24/7
This scene was developed largely using AI tools, such as ready and custom made models from meshy.ai or the source code has been written with a lot of help from ChatGPT. The Models were reduced to lowpoly using Blender, additional Models were also created with it, also using Adobe Substance Painter here.
The entire cave was made using a customized Python script for Blender developed in many hours together with ChatGPT. It automatically creates a closed, double-sided and walkable cave which was later combined with the Tiger/DCL meshes and a connection tunnel was created manually between the bottom of the Pumpkin and the cave. The textures use a weird combination of three different PBR Texture sets created from SBSAR files and in combination they give this realistic cave rock look with the strange glitter effect which is even more impressive when adding lights to the scene.
The Python Cavegenerator script can be found in the "src" folder, and has been tested with Blender 4.4+ - there is also a second python script which creates a fire animation spritesheet from single images. These are arranged in a single texture in a matrix, for example 64 images into 8x8 and played by the script by shifting the UVs to simulate an animated fire. Old but gold Quake III engine trick.
Because there is no real "underground" possible in Decentraland without tricks I decided to put a mesh "above" the cave to cover its dimensions and also have a cool and interesting entrance for it. That's how I came up with the Decentraland Logo in 3D and the Tiger.
The Tiger was made for this scene by just creating an Image of a Tiger and a Pumpkin first and let Meshy.ai then create a full textured 3D model of it. The texture has been reworked a little bit in Photoshop to make it look more clean and matching the rest of the scene. Finally I placed my famous "Tigerwings" wearable from DCL which makes the tiger look even more impressive. You can find the original image I've used in the assets/images folder: tigerscave_original_image.jpg - it's amazing how good it looks, just made by AI and some human retouching.
All other models except the "3D Decentraland logo" with the two pyramids are converted meshy.ai models generated by AI. The complete source for the lights was also created with a lot of help from ChatGPT and resulted in five very useful addins which provide extra commands in SDK7, like for Water, Light, Torchlight, 3D Coords and animated Billboard fire sprites display. The coords display for example was used to place the art objects, I did not comment it out in this demo as it is a very cool feature for development.
The final setup was done with Decentralands own Creator Hub Editor. The total development time from scratch was about one week.
- 🏠 8x8 Parcel size (it had to be that big)
- 🎃 detailed and fully themed spooky 3D Halloween / DCL environment
- 🩻 a dynamic RGB cycle light in the pumpkins mouth
- 💀 animated decorations like dancing green glowing skeletons
- 🌊 green glowing slimy groundwater direct from hell
- 💻 sophisticated code snippets to make life easier as a SDK coder:
- 💻 metatiger_light.ts provides an easier access to the new DCL lights, including Beams and RGB color cycle
- 💻 metatiger_water.ts creates animated water just moving UVs on two or more transparent texture layers
- 💻 metatiger_torchlight.ts attaches a torchlight to your avatar that you can light your path in the dark cave
- 💻 metatiger_coords.ts shows the current coordinates of the avatar as 3D text above its head
- 💻 metatiger_billboardanimation.ts adds an animated fire texture billboard with sound like a torch or campfire
- 💻 additional Python scripts:
- 💻 src/cavegen.py is a Blender script to create a walkable 3D cave in Blender with one click
- 💻 assets/scene/textures/makefire.py create a spritesheet used by the src/metatiger_billboardanimation.ts script
Idea, Project Lead, 2D/3D Design & Art by METATIGER
Some Models created with Meshy – CC0 License. It is not needed to credit the authors but I do it nevertheless because its such a great artwork.
- Ancient Pillar by arq.thompson
- Emberstone by arq.thompson
- Ghost Muffin by hanssi
- Ghoul Parade by 3DMinisByChad
- Halloween Muffin by yakathefox
- Hand by Filip
- Hand Candle by Nope
- Head by Ghostpen
- Luminous Relic by arq.thompson
- Mystic Portal by Whisper
- Necromancer by Strun
- Neon Skeleton by SirVonStein
- Pumpkin Muffin by hanssi
- Stair by nhac1904
- Tree by Parzivala
- Vampire Muffin by yakathefox
- Zombie Icecream by hanssi
- Zombie Dwarf by CoolPuzzler