Back in March, Unity released a real-time rendered short film inspired by Old Norse mythology: The Blacksmith. It was Skyrim via Jeepers Creepers – exactly the sort of pulpy fantasy premise that makes for a graphical showcase filled with fancy hair, reflections and heavy breathing.
If you’ve ever sat through one of those and half-wished it were a real game, there’s a chance this one will be. Unity yesterday released all of its assets, shaders and project tools to the engine’s users for free.
The inexplicably nasty but undeniably impressive happening in a Viking village was put together by three people at Unity – one artist, one animator and one programmer – with a little outside help on the assets, concept art and motion capture.
All of those assets are now available to download on the Unity site, ready to be pulled into the free engine’s editor. There are no limits on its use, so parts of the demo could now feasibly become the basis for a grimdark Norse game.
Its fanciest elements include atmospheric scattering, which sees lighting cleverly affected by its distance from the in-map sun, and real-time simulated cloth. And there’s plenty of detail in that doomed warrior’s head – Unity built a custom shader and physically-based lighting model for the hair, and employed something called “wrinkle mapping” for his face.
Fancy a wander in Unity’s beautiful, horrible creation?