The successful action RPG "Sacred" was developed by Studio II. We were called in towards the end of production to create detailed background images for the start and character screen. We had about three weeks to realize the work.

Start Screen

The start screen holds the game's main menu where the player can make basic settings like game options and choose play modes. The menu text had to be easy to read on a dark background and was surrounded by the Sacred symbol. This guideline was realized in form of a cave entrance. The area in front of the entrance had to be covered with shallow water, which was animated later in the game using a displacement effect. The entrance itself had to be surrounded by various plants. In the background a forest should blend into morning fog. The cloudy sky had to be animatable in the game later on. Therefore the sky layer had to by tileable horizontally.

For the plants we used nearly exclusively polygon Paint Effects. The default shader and textures were reworked to provide a particular, homogenous look. The trees in the background were divided into several layer to reduce the poly count during rendering and gain better control for compositing. The grass in the left front area was created using the landscape tool "Spread Objects", which was originally developed for the CG film "Back to Gaya".

The clouds were generated using Maya's Fluids. The layer was made tileable horizontally later on in Painter.

To create natural looking daylight we rendered the geometry using a default shader without any textures with Mental Ray's final gathering. This image was used later on in composiing as a luminance map. Thus we could combine a scene lit with spotlights and rendered with Maya's software renderer with a final gather render pass in a flexible way.

The individual layers were combined in Digital Fusion. Depth of field and fog were applied using a z-channel. Finally we adjusted the colors globally as well as masked for separate regions.

The water surface and plant in the right front of the image had to be animated in the game. Thus we rendered masks for these elements to be able to extract them after compositing.

Start Screen

Character Screen

In the character screen you can choose the character to play with. The characters had to be positioned in a semicircle standing on stone bases. They should be displayed on top of the background screen as animated realtime models using Sacred's 3D Engine. A cavern was chosen as environment with the whole ground covered by water. Through a small opening in the ceiling bright sunlight should light part of the cavern. Since the Vampire Lady cannot stand sunlight she had to be positioned in a plant's shadow.

The cavern was divded into three layers for compositing. The first layer contained the cavern geometry including the water. A large plant on the right that should cast a shadow onto the vampire lady was put into the second layer. The lightbeams emitted by the sun were rendered as third layer.

The cavern geometry was highly detailed to get nice shading effects on the damp rock.

For the plant we used again Paint Effects converted to polygons. We reused the textures from the start screen and modified them slightly.

The render layers were finally combined and color corrected in Digital Fusion. We modified the color nuances of separate parts in the screen based on the luminance to give the background a broader, interesting color range and mystical look.

Character Screen