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The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith is a real-time rendered short film inspired by Old Norse mythology.
The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith was developed to try out the rendering capabilities of Unity 5. It shows the advanced graphics features that come out of the box. Since the engine is extremely extensible, we could also implement a number of custom solutions.

Making of The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith was made by three people working directly in the Unity engine—an artist, an animator, and a programmer—together with some external help for the assets, concept art, motion capture. They used a build which combines the official version of Unity 5 with a sequencing tool developed internally.

The short film runs at 30 FPS in full-HD on a desktop PC (Core i7 4770 with a GeForce GTX 760).

Physically-based shading

The Standard Shader in Unity 5 is easy to use and extremely flexible at the same time. Therefore, we were able to iterate quickly on material quality.

Standard shader
Standard shader
Custom solution for high resolution realtime shadows
Custom solution for high resolution realtime shadows
Custom shader for hair and beard
Custom shader for hair and beard

High quality lighting and post effects

Global Illumination algorithms achieve a realistic look by including both the light which comes directly from a light source and the light reflected by the surfaces in the scene. Making this film, we used the new real-time global illumination system to change the lighting setup quickly from one shot to the next. Custom-developed post effects enhance the look and feel of the movie.

Indirect lighting
Indirect lighting
Atmospheric scattering
Atmospheric scattering
Color grading
Color grading
Custom motion blur
Custom motion blur

Credits

Demo team

Writer, Director, Art Director
Veselin Efremov

Animation Director
Damien Simper

Tech Lead and Graphics Programming
Torbjorn Laedre

Producer
Silvia Rasheva

Additional art

Concept Art
Georgi Simeonov
Sergey Samuilov

Character Art
Jonas Törnqvist
Sergey Samuilov

Editing, Color Grading
Mihail Moskov

Creative Consultant
Nikolay Toshev

Motion Capture
Imagination Studios

Choreography and Performance
Stuntgruppen

Additional Animation
Imagination Studios

Rigging and Simulation
Bläck Studios

Environment Art
Plamen Tamnev
Sergey Samuilov
Martin Huisman

Additional Environment Art
Jonas Levin

Concept Art - Environment
Dimitar Marinski

Pre-visualisation
5th Degree

Music

Song
“Ilmarinen’s Lament”, Composed and Performed by Theo Hakola

Sound Design and Additional Music
Music Marks

Unity Technologies additional programming

Dominykas Kiauleikis
Robert Cupisz
Dominic Laflamme
Catherine Proulx
Andre Gauthier
Pierre-Paul Giroux
Renaldas Zioma

© 2015 Unity Technologies