Unity Lab / Mosaic Bench
Materials · Mosaic

Mosaic Bench

A mosaicist's bench with a half-set panel, and the point of the piece is what the materials DO. Five kinds of tessera share the panel - gold-leaf smalti, blue glass, glazed terracotta, white marble and riven slate - and every one of them is generated in code at load: its colour map, its bump relief and its metal and gloss, none of it painted in advance. Rake the light with the arrow keys and watch them disagree: the gold flares hard, the glass throws a tight glint, the terracotta answers softly and the slate just goes on being slate, its riven surface catching the grazing light along one axis. Pick a material with 1-5 and set the missing tesserae into the empty slots. Pad, harp and marimba - all sampled instruments.

AI concept painting
1 · AI concept
Concept prompt

A mosaic-maker's workbench in a sunlit stone workshop: a large half-finished mosaic panel laid flat on a heavy oak bench, its surface a dense field of small square tesserae in wildly different materials — glinting gold-leaf smalti catching the light, deep lapis-blue glass, glossy glazed terracotta, matte white marble, dark riven slate — with sorting trays of loose tiles heaped by colour beside it, tile nippers and a mortar bowl, fine stone dust, a tall window throwing a warm shaft of daylight across the panel so every material answers the light differently, glossy tiles flaring bright specular highlights while matte stone stays soft, rich craft-workshop mood, high-end stylized 3D game render, no text, no watermark, no UI

Blender studio render
2 · Blender render (code-modeled)
1-5 pick a material - SPACE sets a tessera - arrows rake the light across the panel - R resets Open fullscreen ↗
Made by AI, compiled by the real Unity 6 engine. This is a materials probe, and it was chosen by measuring the gap: 67 prior cycles had zero coverage of roughness ramps, normal maps or procedural texture sets. Each of the five families builds an albedo Texture2D and a NORMAL Texture2D with SetPixels from one shared height field, so relief and colour agree the way a real surface does, plus its own metallic and smoothness. The live audit MEASURES the result in screen pixels rather than trusting the numbers we set: it publishes each family's screen coordinates, rakes the light through nine azimuths and samples the rendered bands. Normal maps came back PROVEN - slate at relief 7.0 gains ten times the within-band detail that flat marble does as the light goes grazing. Three Blender exports carry the room: the oak bench with its PanelRef bed, the sorting trays, and the nippers and mortar. All sound is sampled - never synthesized.