Kelp Otter
A sea otter in a sunlit kelp forest, and the whole piece is about how she MOVES through water. Steer and she banks and turns; thrust and she surges, and the nose always leads - she swims the way she is pointed, never sliding through the water face-up or backwards. A travelling wave runs down her spine into a long tapering tail while all four webbed paws paddle out of phase, and the whole undulation speeds up and deepens as she does. Air is finite: dive to the rocks for an abalone and you are on a breath budget, and if it runs out she floats up for air on her own. Bring a shell to the surface and she rolls onto her back - the way a real otter rests - and cracks it on her chest with a stone. Three shells and the day is done. Pad, harp and celesta - all sampled instruments - carry the green quiet.
Play it now
Arrows steer - SPACE swims - E takes a shell and cracks it at the surface - 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 sea otter underwater in a sunlit kelp forest: a sleek brown otter mid-swim with its body arched and streamlined, nose leading and all four webbed paws paddling, gliding between tall amber-green kelp stipes that rise from a rocky seabed toward the surface, thick god-rays of green-gold sunlight slanting down through the water, small silver fish schooling around the fronds, scattered urchins and abalone shells on the rocks below, drifting particles catching the light, deep teal-green water fading to darkness in the distance, warm sunlit cathedral-of-kelp 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 is SWIMMER locomotion, the one gait this lab had never proven: thrust pushes along the heading and the body is slerped onto the VELOCITY vector, so the nose leads by construction rather than by animation trickery, and the live audit samples nose-vs-velocity alignment continuously to prove it. The spine is a real chain - chest, mid, hind and three tail segments - carrying a sine wave with a per-segment phase lag whose amplitude tracks measured speed, with the four limbs paddling phase-offset. Four code-modeled Blender exports ship as named nodes: the otter with her full Piv* joint rig and a HoldRef for carried objects, the shell-cracking stone as its own unit, a kelp plant instanced into a forest, and the rock outcrop carrying the abalone. The hero was authored under the character standard - one fused sculpted mass per rigid segment, features fused into the head rather than bolted on, and every form resampled so no blob chain shows. All sound is sampled - pad, harp, celesta and glockenspiel - never synthesized.