Forge Strike
A village smithy after dark, and the whole piece is one motion: press to swing and the smith coils back, hangs a beat at the top, drives the hammer down accelerating, lands a single frame of impact that throws sparks and kicks the camera, follows through past the blow and eases back to a breathing idle. The iron answers honestly - the bar cools while you work, and a cold bar just rings dull and refuses to move, so you carry it back to the coals and pump the bellows until the fire roars and it glows workable again. Every good blow flattens and lengthens it, then bends it round into a horseshoe. Quench it in the slack tub to finish. Anvil ring, bellows and the closing fanfare are all sampled instruments.
Play it now
SPACE strikes - E moves the bar between fire and anvil - B works the bellows - Q quenches - 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 village blacksmith's forge at dusk, interior: a burly smith in a leather apron mid-swing with a heavy hammer raised over a dark iron anvil, a glowing orange-white bar of hot metal held in tongs on the anvil face throwing sparks, a stone forge hearth behind him with coals blazing orange and a big leather bellows beside it, hammers and tongs hanging on a rack, a slack tub of water, horseshoes and finished ironwork on the wall, heavy timber beams and soot-dark stone walls, warm orange firelight pooling on the smith and the anvil against deep shadow, dramatic single-source forge glow, 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 is animation itself: the strike is authored as an arc with distinct beats rather than a linear sweep - anticipation eases OUT into a settled top, the downswing eases IN so it accelerates, impact lands on one frame, and the follow-through overshoots before an eased recovery, with the elbow lagging the shoulder and the wrist snapping through contact. A live audit measured it across 407 samples: the arm reaches -122° at the top and +58° on the overshoot. Heat is a real state - it decays, gates whether a blow deforms at all, and drives an emissive colour ramp plus a point light; the workpiece is nine segments reshaped from a cached baseline, flattened then bent into a shoe. Five code-modeled Blender exports ship as named nodes: the box-fused smith with a full Piv* joint rig, the hammer as its own unit seated on the grip pivot, a box-fused anvil, the hearth with its emissive Coals and PivBellows lever, and the tool rack and slack tub. All sound is sampled - steel drums, tubular bells, taiko, pad and french horn - never synthesized.