HANGAR 01

An Evangelion hangar rebuilt at Xenogears' eye level, running in real time. 2D pixel sprites laid over a 3D hangar, framed with a classic JRPG camera so you look up at the machine. Every image below is raw Godot runtime output — no post-processing.

_{10 s of the 20 s capture, straight from the engine — 720 px, 10 fps, no editing beyond the crop.}

Where it comes from

• Xenogears (1998) — 2D sprite characters walking across polygonal space, and a low camera that makes a mech several times a person's height. The form of this project comes from here.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion — symmetrical maintenance gantries, the front bridge, olive panel walls, red warning lamps, the 01 marking on the back wall, and the blue dock the unit stands in. The space comes from here.

This is a reference reconstruction, so no original assets were used. Every shape was generated from scratch.

Pipeline — Tripo · Astra · Godot

Three tools, each owning only the stretch it does best. Every asset was made with Astra and Tripo. No purchased assets.

	Tool	Owns
01	Tripo — 3D Generation	The 3D forms of the unit and the hangar structures. Once the front and side silhouettes are fixed, they become the reference volume for everything after.
02	Astra — Art & Pixel	The pilot sprite (8-direction idle / walking), background tone, pixel texture. Sets the rules of color and shading that sit on top of the 3D forms.
03	Godot — Assembly & Runtime	Scene assembly, lighting, depth of field, water shader, camera. The final image is all engine rendering.

generate form  →  art · pixels  →  assemble scene  →  light · shade  →  play in real time
    TRIPO           ASTRA             GODOT              GODOT             RUNTIME

The problem the image solves

Pixel characters and 3D space natively live on different grids. Making the two layers feel like one world was the only real task in this scene, and it is solved three ways.

• Agreeing on resolution — a PSX presentation pass puts a 640×480 pixel grid and 32 levels per color channel over the whole screen. Rather than dropping the 3D render resolution, a screen shader draws the grid, so the 3D structures read as dots too.
• Light — the caustics in the dock push the space up from below like they were the only light source. Teal volumetric fog and two shadow-casting spotlights from above build the depth.
• Blur — a tilt-shift keeps only the central band, where the unit stands, sharp. The near railing is crisp and everything inward softens, giving perspective to a picture that would otherwise read flat.

Unit and pilot

• UNIT 01 — MECH · Red armor against a blue-grey endoskeleton splits the form. A pixel tone laid over Tripo's 3D mesh keeps the polygonal mass while letting the surface read as dots.
• PILOT — SPRITE · A narrow palette of grey with orange accents. The hangar is dark, so silhouette has to read before color — the shoulder and leg outlines are kept heavy.
• SCALE · The pilot is shorter than the thickness of the unit's arm. That one ratio explains the size of the whole hangar.

Specification

ENGINE	Godot 4.7 · Forward+
3D ASSETS	Tripo
ART / PIXEL	Astra
CAPTURE	3456 × 2234 · 59.85 fps · 20.0 s
CLIP ABOVE	720 × 433 · 10 fps · 10.0 s, cropped from that capture

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Running and controls

Press F6 to run scenes/mecha_hangar.tscn, or F5 to run the project.

• WASD / arrow keys: move the player (relative to the current camera)

• Shift: run

• 1: default front framing

• 2: diagonal framing

• 3: top-down framing

• P: toggle the PSX screen effect

• T: toggle the tilt-shift lens effect

• Hold right mouse button + WASD: fly the camera; mouse: look

• Q / E: camera-local down / up, Shift: move faster

• R: reset the current camera, Esc: release the mouse

addons/Tripo3d_Godot_Bridge is a symlink into a local ~/GodotAddons/. Cloning this repo elsewhere leaves the link broken — disable the addon in the editor, or populate that path yourself.

Technical notes

Scene structure

Groups 01–09 in the scene tree let you edit the dock, walls, platforms, maintenance arms, robot, props, workers, lighting and cameras independently. The structures are real saved mesh nodes and do not depend on runtime generation. The 2D sprite player in scenes/player.tscn starts on the front bridge. Movement is limited to the front bridge and the near stretch of the side walkways; physics collision for the full structure is not implemented. The player holds still while the right-mouse camera is being driven.

Splitting and reusing generated assets

The original Tripo scenes and FBX files are preserved. The 106 connected components inside the hangar FBX were split out into TripoModels/hangar_separated/hangar_loose_parts.glb with their original UVs and textures intact. Of those, the walls, platforms, maintenance arms, doors, hoses, drums, crates, warning lamps and control boxes are reused in the current scene. The source_part metadata and node name on each mesh identify the original part number.

The overall layout, structural supports, railings and dock floor are original composition. The robot uses its own FBX textures; the extracted environment parts use the original hangar texture atlas. Procedural surface noise textures used earlier were removed. Original parts were reoriented and rescaled, and some of the crookedness of the generated meshes was deliberately kept.

PSX presentation

Nearest-neighbor texture filtering, unshaded materials, a 640×480 on-screen pixel grid, 32 levels per color channel and light dithering. The 3D render resolution itself is not lowered — a screen shader draws the pixel grid. P isolates the screen effect for comparison; in the editor, toggle 10_PSXPresentation or tune the parameters in shaders/psx_display.gdshader.

Tilt-shift and atmosphere

The tilt-shift lives on 11_TiltShift/LensBlur. It is a screen-space effect that keeps the central band — where the robot stands — sharp and softens smoothly toward the top and bottom of the frame. Tune focus_center (band height), focus_half_width (half-width of the sharp band), falloff (transition width), tilt (band angle) and blur_amount (blur strength) in shaders/tilt_shift.gdshader. It is applied after the PSX pass; P and T compare each independently. It survives scene regeneration.

The sharp band was widened to 44% of screen height to push the blur out to the edges. The Environment on HangarAtmosphere carries teal volumetric fog, and the shadow-casting spotlights 08_Lighting/GodRayLeft and GodRayRight produce the shafts coming down from above. Fog density is volumetric_fog_density, shaft strength is light_volumetric_fog_energy on each light, and width is spot_angle. Existing lights had their fog contribution lowered so the whole frame does not wash out.

Surface shaders

Columns, beams, railings and platform sides that used to read as flat color now use shaders/atlas_surface.gdshader. It samples the metal-panel region of the original Tripo atlas directly and lays that shading over the existing color. Tiling is in world space, so the texture does not stretch across long structures; atlas_region, tiles_per_meter and texture_strength control region, scale and strength. The source texture files themselves are untouched.

PurplePitFloor uses the blue water material in shaders/pit_water.gdshader: world-space ripples, two layers of softly deforming teal caustics, and a moving surface normal. Mesh position and size are unchanged and the surface is opaque. Tune wave_speed, wave_scale, normal_strength, highlight_strength, ripple_center and the three colors. The water material survives scene regeneration.

Player

The player uses the 8-direction idle / walking assets unpacked into sprites/player. It plays the idle animation when stopped and the matching 8-direction walk when moving. Shift speeds up playback as well as movement, and hitting a walkway boundary returns it to idle. Speed and movement bounds are in scripts/player.gd; size is the pixel_size on the player scene.

Regenerating the scene

tools/build_hangar.gd is the source of the layout. The command below regenerates the saved hangar scene and will overwrite anything edited by hand in the editor.

godot --headless --path . --script tools/build_hangar.gd

Refresh previews: godot --path . --script tools/capture_hangar.gd