Postcard

A free experimental tech demo showcasing realistic 3D-scanned real-world environments using Gaussian splats.
A walkable snapshot of a moment in time.

An original Ludagon title solo developed by Ricky Vuckovic.

Play Postcard for free on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4032540/Postcard/

Ricky’s story

It is over ten years since I 3D scanned eight ancient artefacts for the ANU Classics Museum, and scanning technology has improved a lot since then.

In 2024, after using 3D scans to help with architectural reference models for another project, plus looking at scans from drone footage in architectural and industrial work, I started to wonder whether 3D scanning could work for digitising entire real-world locations as playable game environments.

I experimented with scanning into Gaussian splats in 2025 and fell in love with the incredible visual fidelity, though it also felt quite limiting due to there being no tangible “model”, just millions of coloured dots (splats) scattered in space, and no way of relighting or shading them. Regardless, the result looked awesome, and I was determined to find a way to use environmental scans as playable environments.

Making it playable

Each area in Postcard is the result of me filming continuous video with a GoPro or iPhone over 15-30 minutes, recording as many angles as possible in as wide an area as I could access. I also took HDRI panoramic photos for image-based lighting, and recorded an array of environmental sounds for ambience as well as my footsteps on different surface types (grass, rock, gravel) in the locations.

I processed the splats with Teleport by Varjo, which results in beautiful environments made of about 5 million splats.

These don’t have any physical volume, so I also processed the same footage in PolyCam to get a traditional mesh that would form the main terrain collider. Getting abstract splats and meshes to line up was a pain but it was fantastic to see the characters react to each little detail in the terrain.

Because Gaussian splats don’t have physical form, they also don’t normally catch shadows. They also have all their shadows pre-baked in as a result of the photography. I made a shadow matte material for the terrain mesh to act as a shadow catcher, and then had to manually mask out each area that already had environmental shadows on them so that the player character wouldn’t cast a secondary shadow onto the already-darkened area.

These tricky and fiddly things are exactly why I wanted to make Postcard. I’m seeing more walkable splat environments being made in this second half of 2026, generally as first person fixed or a fixed angle third person, usually flat terrain (a lot of real estate walkthroughs) or something with easy voxels (splat-transform is magical for these cases), and either no shadows or a generic blob shadow. Third-person is so much harder too as the camera has much more freedom of movement than a first-person view.

It makes me only prouder to get something done and published a little bit before the flood of automated splat walkthroughs, using my childhood backyard of Mount Rogers as my hero image and first environment with its raw natural mountain terrain with accurate shadow casting and genuine environmental sounds from the location.

Where it could go

I would love to use this tech and workflow on cultural storytelling and exploring heritage.

Hopefully someone out there is interested in working together on something!