Laying out a new village scene with the SUNTAIL pack — a full visual makeover

I bought the SUNTAIL – Stylized Fantasy Village (Raygeas) pack and imported it. I kept the existing SampleScene as a backup and decided to lay the village out again in a new scene. For now the village layout follows the SampleScene structure as is.

While working on it, I started thinking the village camera should probably be different from before too. It might turn into a full 3D camera, but that's still undecided. So I aimed for a village that works from any angle, a full 360°, whether it's a quarter view or eye level.

What I built

The new scene, SuntailVillage, is created with a single click of a generator menu. Running it again rebuilds the scene from scratch, so any hand edits are lost. The player, camera, 8 NPCs, dialogue, name tags, money, BGM, door transitions, opening sequence, clouds and post-processing all stayed as they were, and I didn't touch SampleScene or the pack's original files.

For the 5 role buildings (tavern, shop, red-roofed blacksmith, guild, house), I picked a SUNTAIL house for each one and swapped it in at the same spot. All the doors face south.

The terrain is 400×400 m. Inside the village (58 m radius) it's flat, outside there are gentle hills, and only the directions where roads lead out are left as valleys. On top of that I painted a cross-shaped stone road (4.8 m wide) and a 16×16 m plaza.

82 props fill the old prop spots: things like the plaza well and streetlights, market stalls, the anvil and furnace in the blacksmith's yard, and the guild's quest board. The pack has no benches, so I used bushy flower beds in place of the plaza benches. After adding the surrounding forest (46–92 m radius), the back forest up on the hills (92–185 m), about 1,900 grass clumps, 320 flower patches, 70 rocks and 9 distant mountains, it started to feel like a real village.

Since the spacing got wider, I also moved the player start point, the 8 NPCs and the 12 opening camera path points out by 1.3×. I re-placed the 3 door transition points on the ground below the steps in front of the actual doors, with the arrival points 2 m outside them. The NavMesh only builds within ±62 m of the village, so you can't wander off into the hills.

The camera might change, so I also looked around from human eye level. Even after reopening the scene, paths connect to all 3 doors, all 3 arrival points and all 8 NPCs. In Play mode the opening runs all the way through (entrance → blacksmith, tavern and guild shots → overview → quarter view), and walking to the tavern door takes you into the tavern interior.

Things I thought about

Models at 0.8×, layout at 1.3×. SUNTAIL buildings are 12–15 m tall with doors around 2.2 m, sized for real people, so they looked way too big next to the SD characters (about 1.5 m). I scaled the models down to 10–12 m buildings with doors around 1.75 m, and widened the spacing so the buildings, still bigger than before, would fit. Both values sit at the very top of the generator, so I can change them anytime.
Sunlight 1.55 → 1.0. At the original intensity, SUNTAIL's stone roads and white walls looked washed out. I compared the two values side by side in the Game view to decide.
No SUNTAIL demo post-processing. It uses ACES with a warm white balance, which goes against my rules of avoiding warm tones and keeping character colors fixed. I kept the old village's post-processing.

Rabbit hole: all the painted terrain turned back into grass

I'd painted all the stone roads and dirt, but whenever I hit Play or reopened the scene, the whole terrain showed up as grass. Turns out the terrain paint data (alphamaps) wasn't being saved. Once I marked the sub-textures as changed and saved them too, the paint stuck.

Next up

Decide the scale factors (0.8× and 1.3×) during the final detail pass
Interior scene exits still lead back to the old village (SampleScene). That changes how the backup scene behaves, so I'll decide on it separately before changing it
Once the camera style is settled, readjust the road width, scale, grass density and opening shot framing (the blacksmith shot shows its east wall instead of the front)
Haven't measured performance yet. About 2,550 grass/flower renderers, about 2,350 forest and about 1,100 building renderers, plus 46 active lights and 134 particle systems

What I built

For the 5 role buildings (tavern, shop, red-roofed blacksmith, guild, house), I picked a SUNTAIL house for each one and swapped it in at the same spot. All the doors face south.

Things I thought about

Models at 0.8×, layout at 1.3×. SUNTAIL buildings are 12–15 m tall with doors around 2.2 m, sized for real people, so they looked way too big next to the SD characters (about 1.5 m). I scaled the models down to 10–12 m buildings with doors around 1.75 m, and widened the spacing so the buildings, still bigger than before, would fit. Both values sit at the very top of the generator, so I can change them anytime.

Sunlight 1.55 → 1.0. At the original intensity, SUNTAIL's stone roads and white walls looked washed out. I compared the two values side by side in the Game view to decide.

No SUNTAIL demo post-processing. It uses ACES with a warm white balance, which goes against my rules of avoiding warm tones and keeping character colors fixed. I kept the old village's post-processing.

Next up

Decide the scale factors (0.8× and 1.3×) during the final detail pass

Interior scene exits still lead back to the old village (SampleScene). That changes how the backup scene behaves, so I'll decide on it separately before changing it

Once the camera style is settled, readjust the road width, scale, grass density and opening shot framing (the blacksmith shot shows its east wall instead of the front)

Haven't measured performance yet. About 2,550 grass/flower renderers, about 2,350 forest and about 1,100 building renderers, plus 46 active lights and 134 particle systems