Canal Barge
A working canal on a golden afternoon, and the whole run is one unbroken passage: ease the throttle forward a notch at a time, steer with a tiller that actually swings, and take the narrowboat down to the lock. The gates swing open on their hinge edges, the chamber floods, the water and the boat rise together, the far pair opens and you carry on to the village quay to berth her. A watermill turns beside the lock with spill falling off the paddles, ducks work the bank, and the hull pushes a real bow wake across water that ripples rather than sits. Bump a wall and she fends off and recovers. Four code-modeled Blender exports carry the scene; concertina, mandolin and violin - all sampled instruments - play the folk phrase when you tie up.
Play it now
Up/down set the throttle - left/right the rudder - through the lock, then berth at the quay - R resets
The concept is the contract
The piece was concepted first — an AI key-art painting — and its hero assets were then code-modeled in headless Blender and audited against that concept. The pair below is the contract and the build.
Concept prompt
A sunny golden afternoon on a quiet stone-walled canal: a long narrow green barge with red trim and a small wooden cabin chugging toward an old stone lock with heavy wooden gates, a watermill with a turning wheel beside the lock, tall poplar trees and reeds along the grassy towpath, a village quay with bollards and crates in the distance, gentle ripples on the calm green water, ducks near the bank, warm honey light and long soft shadows, peaceful working-canal storybook mood, high-end stylized 3D game render, no text, no watermark, no UI
Code-modeled in Blender
The hero assets were modelled by agents writing Blender code against the platform sculpt kit — no downloaded models anywhere — and rendered by the studio harness for audit before entering the engine scene.
Made by AI, compiled by the real Unity 6 engine
The probe here is a long vehicle in a staged waterway: the barge is a Rigidbody with a body-sized BoxCollider (a round CharacterController capsule sinks a long hull into obstacles), driven by discrete throttle and rudder notches rather than analogue keys so the feel is barge-authentic and the audit is deterministic. The lock is a phase machine swinging four re-pivoted gate leaves on their hinge locators while a third water plane and the boat rise together. Water is a live three-octave vertex surface, not a slab; the sky is a camera-following gradient band with a wisp cloud layer and a far treeline. Four Blender exports ship as named nodes: the box-fused hull with its PivTiller, the mitred gate leaf on PivHinge, the mill with its PivWheel waterwheel and the stone quay. All sound is sampled - concertina, mandolin, violin, glockenspiel and tabla - never synthesized.