Sanzaru Games - Huldufolk Gnomes and The Tavern

The Ask

Sanzaru Games builds worlds. For the launch of Asgard’s Wrath, their latest title for the Meta Quest platform, they needed richly detailed Norse mythology to exist outside of the screen and in the physical world, and that’s where Show Ready came in.

The brief started with the characters, the Huldufolk Gnomes. One of the game's most distinctive and fun elements, the gnomes needed to be fabricated as life-sized scenic sculptures and mounted alongside custom shields for the launch event. Every little detail from the original 3D designs had to carry through into the physical build: scale, color, surface texture, all the pieces needed to satisfy the team that built the digital originals.

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The Solution

Show Ready’s scenic fabrication team executed the Huldufolk Gnome program from digital asset to the finished, mounted sculpture, including: CNC fabrication, structural hardcoating, and hand-applied scenic painting, all to the same exacting standards.

From Digital to Physical

Sanzaru provided high-resolution files of the character designs that Show Ready’s team used to cut character forms from on 10-axis CNC machines directly, translating original 3D geometry into physical shape with exacting scale and precision. The gnomes were constructed from hard-coated foam, a material lightweight enough for event handling and display, but sturdy enough to weather long-term use and movement. Hard-coated foam holds a fine surface finish, takes scenic paint to the level of detail characters need, and doesn’t carry the unnecessary weight of denser materials.

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Scenic Painting and Finishing

Custom scenic shields at 36” diameter were fabricated and finished with hard-coated foam and hand-painted to match the in-game designs. Show Ready’s team expertly mounted the finished shields to the display counter for the launch presentation, completing the installation with the same precision applied to the character sculptures throughout.

The display was completed with period-appropriate environmental dressing – props and set pieces that grounded the Huldufolk characters in the Norse world they inhabit, giving the full installation context beyond sculptures themselves.

The full scenic fabrication sequence, from prep to priming, painting, and finishing to mounting, was managed in-house at Show Ready’s facility in Southern California. Every step was sequenced to hold the production timeline without compromising finished quality and left the shop display-ready.

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Results

The Huldufolk Gnome sculptures delivered what was required: physical characters built from a digital world with such precision that the team who designed them couldn’t tell the difference from screen to stage. The CNC-cut forms held the scale of the source assets perfectly. The hand-painted scenic matched the in-game color palettes and textures at close viewing distance — the standard that matters when your audience is the dev team that spent months looking at the same characters on-screen.

From CNC cut to final coat, every decision in the scenic fabrication process served the same goal: make physical indistinguishable from digital. For the gnomes of Asgard’s Wrath, it was.