A clockmaker's repair bench at night: half-dismantled mantel clocks pushed to the back, brass gear trains and an escapement laid out on a green felt mat, a tool pot of screwdrivers and tweezers, a wall of parts drawers, a tall regulator clock standing open behind — all under one warm desk lamp on a gooseneck. Every gear turns and the regulator's pendulum swings while a slow dolly drifts along the bench. The probe here is a runtime reflection probe: the brass is metallic and smooth, so what it reflects IS the look, and the probe captures the lit workshop so the brass glints with the room in it instead of reading as flat paint. Press R and the reflection falls away to the near-black night sky — that difference is exactly what the audit measures at published brass points against a matte felt control. Sampled celesta, harp and soft ticks; every sound in the piece is a sampled instrument note.
1 · AI conceptConcept prompt
A cramped clockmaker's repair workshop at night, seen close: a heavy wooden bench crowded with half-dismantled mantel clocks and pocket watches, brass gear trains and escapement wheels laid out on a felt mat, tiny screwdrivers and tweezers in a rack, a jeweller's loupe on a stand, coiled mainsprings and a jar of watch hands, a tall regulator clock with its case open behind showing pendulum and weights, shelves of clock faces and small brass parts drawers climbing the wall, one warm desk lamp throwing a tight pool of light across the brass so it glints while the room falls into deep blue shadow, dust in the lamp beam, quiet patient craft mood, high-end stylized 3D game render, no text, no watermark, no UI
2 · Blender render (code-modeled)
Any key starts · R toggles the reflection probe · F freezes the camera at the audit poseOpen fullscreen ↗
Made by AI, compiled by the real Unity 6 engine. This is a PROPS/SETS piece — a kit of many small related objects that must read as one workshop, which is exactly the coherence the pipeline is weakest at. Three Blender exports carry the set: the bench with the regulator clock, the loose movements and gear trains, and the tools and shelving as their own unit so held props never bake a pose they are not used in. The engine probe is a runtime ReflectionProbe, chosen by applying a hard-won stripping lesson BEFORE writing code: light cookies and GPU instancing both need shader variants that a code-built scene strips out of the WebGL player, but URP's environment-reflection path is always compiled, so the probe cannot fail for reasons that say nothing about probes. The experiment ships with its own control group — three published brass points that must change when the probe toggles and two matte felt points that must not — and the honest result is recorded in the lab ledger: the probe demonstrably captures and drives the brass at two of the three points, while the third, a small partly-shadowed escapement wheel, did not clear a control that itself still moves. One real defect was found and fixed at close-out: a probe render issued during scene construction, before the camera has ever drawn a frame, silently never produces a texture — the piece now re-issues the render until the texture exists, so the reflection is live by default rather than only after a manual toggle. All sound is sampled - never synthesized.
