FromSoftware spent years making its biggest game world ever in Elden Ring's Lands Between, and now one fan of this massive open-world RPG spent roughly 500 hours making a tinier, still-massive, low-poly version of it. And man, it is cool.
Reddit user and Github creator Honzaap shared their creation with the Elden Ring subreddit over the weekend, and it quickly caught fire among the community. Intrigued by the scale of this thing, flummoxed by their claim that it took 500 hours to make, and oddly nostalgic for a similar "Tiny Elden Ring" previously shared on Sketchfab by Konstantin Chemelev, I reached out to Honzaap to talk through this tiny giant.
Before that, you can tour the low-poly Lands Between for yourself here. Toggle the camera in the bottom right to get up close and personal.
The Lands Between made in low-poly style from r/Eldenring
I was delighted to learn that I was right on the money: Honzaap says they were inspired by Chemelev's Tiny Elden Ring to begin with. "I just had to see what it would look like with the whole map," they tell 12DOVE."I will admit that Konstantin's model looks much better, I am not that great with low-poly style."
"I thought it would be cool if I made this for the whole map," they add. "For positions, I used the in-game map combined with a top-down view map of the actual game, which I found on the lostgamer.io website. They use it for a Geoguesser-like game of Elden Ring. I also used a program called DSMapStudio which lets me inspect the whole map in 3D."
Where did those 500 hours go? Over the course of around five months, Honzaap says they spent "about 470 hours" actually making the map model itself. "I also included the time I needed to set it up for display on a web page, since I can't just put the entire model there. The most time was spent on making models that can't be reused. Generally those were legacy dungeons, forts, castles etc. There are many things that I had to only make once and then I could reuse them, but placing hundreds of trees, rocks and other stuff takes a long time as well. The single most time-consuming area was the capital city Leyndell, which took about a week."
As noted on Github, this project uses a few third-party assets for things like skeletons, wyverns, dragons, witches, and turtles, plus a few trees Honzaap says they forgot to mention. No generative tools were used. "The terrain was all hand-made by me, and this was probably the second-most time consuming part," Honzaap says.
"I worked on it pretty much whenever I could," they continue. "Especially on weekends and at the start of summer break, since I am still in university. I usually watched videos or movies on the second monitor." Honzaap has shared somewhat similar creations on Github before; I asked if this massive model served as a bit of practice for their Blender technique, and they said it was "definitely more" than that. "I have the controls of Blender pretty much burned into my brain now."
The elaborate city of Leyndell was, unsurprisingly, among the most difficult areas to build. Crumbling Farum Azula, which you'll find floating in painstaking detail off to the east side of the map, and the crimson grotesqueries of Caelid are close behind. "Leyndell is huge and complex, so it was difficult to even know where to start," Honzaap explains. "Azula is the most unique out of the locations so my usual methods didn't really work. Caelid has so much stuff and is also kinda bumpy, which made it hard to make."
They're most proud of their low-poly Raya Lucaria Academy, partly because "I think the low-poly style suits it well." I'm partial to Farum Azula myself, but the detailed stairs and buttresses on Miquella's Haligtree, carved into a hidden side of the recreation, are also something to see.
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