The world of Seren is built from specific places. Not fantasy geography, not generic medievalism, but recognisable South Welsh texture: terraced houses, grey stone, the particular quality of light that comes through valley hills in early morning.
For the visual novel backgrounds, I am building these scenes in Blender and rendering them as 2D images that slot into the game engine. This devlog documents that pipeline.
The Scene: Risca Terrace
The first major background scene is a Welsh terraced street — the kind you find throughout the South Wales valleys. Two rows of houses facing each other across a narrow road, brick and render, bay windows, front steps that meet the pavement directly with no front gardens.
The challenge is getting the specificity right. There is a visual vocabulary here — the chimney stacks, the particular window proportions, the greenery that pushes through where it can — that communicates this place, this history rather than a generic "old street."
Meshy AI for Props
I've been using Meshy AI to generate props that would take too long to model from scratch: post boxes, gate posts, a particular style of lamp, smaller details that add life to the scene.
The workflow:
- Describe the prop with as much specificity as possible (period, regional style, material, condition)
- Generate multiple variants, pick the one closest to the target
- Clean up in Blender — retopology where needed, UV adjustment, texture refinement
- Place in scene
The outputs from Meshy are not final. They are starting points that save time on base geometry. The refinement step is where they become specific rather than generic.
MCP Blender Plugin for Lighting
This is the part I find most interesting. I have been using the MCP Blender plugin to direct lighting and scene adjustments through conversation — essentially describing what I want and having the plugin make the adjustments.
For this scene:
- A low morning sun raking across the street from the left, long shadows
- A soft ambient fill from an overcast sky — bright but diffuse, the kind of grey-white Welsh morning light
- A hint of warm interior light in one window, suggesting someone is already awake
The MCP workflow is useful for iteration. Describing the emotional quality of the lighting — Welsh autumn morning, cool and still, the smell of coal smoke still in the air from yesterday — and having that translated into actual scene settings is a faster way to reach the right atmosphere than adjusting values by hand.
Rendering for 2D
The render settings are tuned for the output format: backgrounds for a visual novel display at high horizontal resolution, wide aspect ratio, with specific areas that need to be uncluttered for character sprites and dialogue boxes.
I'm rendering with Cycles for quality, with a moderate sample count that balances render time against noise. Post-processing in Blender's compositor adds a subtle desaturation and a slight vignette that matches the game's visual tone.
What's Coming
The next scene is an interior — Seren's room in the house she has returned to. Smaller, more intimate, heavy with the weight of what is not there. That will require a different approach to lighting and a different emotional register.
Documentation to follow.