An autumn evening in a walled dale, and the light is nearly gone. You never touch the sheep: you place the dog, and the flock moves because he is there. Click the pasture to send him - wide to swing them, tight to push them on - and press S to drop him so they settle. Six ewes, one fold, and a gate on the side you have to drive them from. Each ewe answers four pressures at once - flee the dog, keep off her neighbours, stay with the flock, and hold her ground once she is penned - so the shepherding is emergent rather than scripted: there is no path they follow and no invisible rail, only a flight zone that tightens the closer the dog comes.
1 · AI conceptConcept prompt
high-end stylized 3D game render, autumn evening in a green upland valley, a border collie sheepdog running low and fast driving a small flock of sheep toward a drystone fold, weathered drystone walls dividing wet green pasture, a whitewashed stone farmhouse with a slate roof and lit windows, russet bracken on the hillsides, a rocky beck running through the valley bottom, low mist collecting in the hollow, wet slate and moss, warm low evening sun breaking under heavy cloud, palette wet slate grey, deep pasture green, russet bracken, whitewash, amber window light
2 · Blender render (code-modeled)
Tap once for sound - CLICK the pasture to send the dog - S drops him so the flock settles - R new flockOpen fullscreen ↗
Made by AI, compiled by the real Unity 6 engine. The animals are not animation clips. The collie and the ewe are modelled in headless Blender as separately NAMED PARTS in a neutral standing pose - body, neck, head, muzzle, ears, tail, and three segments plus a paw per leg - and the engine finds each part by name at load, reads where it actually landed, and builds a joint hierarchy with every pivot computed from the imported bounds rather than from hand-converted coordinates. The gait is then written in code: diagonal pairs move together in a trot, the knee folds only on the recovery half of the stride (a leg that bends while carrying weight reads as broken), and the whole cycle is advanced by MEASURED horizontal speed so the stride rate always matches ground speed and the feet cannot skate. A boot self-test drives the dog at 1 m/s and at 6 m/s and asserts the phase advances six times faster. Another walks the full stride and asserts no paw sinks into the hill - the first version failed that at half a metre of sink, which is why the animals now lift by whatever their deepest foot would have buried. Nine assets were authored for the valley: three of them - the tree, the beck and the fells - each had to be rebuilt once after the audit showed a broccoli on a pole, a row of paving slabs, and a wall of black cardboard.
