Celebrating poetry in real time with Unity 🏆
The writer Miriam Reyes has been awarded the National Poetry Prize for her work Con, recognizing the quality and originality of her writing. This cultural milestone finds in Unity the perfect platform for its visual and interactive recreation, allowing the essence of the ceremony and the world of poetry to be captured through a 3D stage, cinematic lighting, and narrative elements that pay homage to the depth of her work.
Building the stage and visual elements
The process begins by creating the ceremony hall in Unity:
- Main stage with planes and scaled cubes to form the base
- Podium and lectern modeled with primitives and imported details
- Audience chairs organized in radial patterns using prefabs
- Trophy modeled with sculpting tools or imported from Blender
- Decorative elements like curtains, flags, and projection screens
All elements are organized hierarchically in the scene for efficient management. 📚
Cinematic lighting with HDRP
Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline enables realistic lighting:
- Directional lights as main spotlights over the stage
- Spotlights with narrow angles to highlight the trophy and lectern
- Light Probes for precise indirect lighting in interior spaces
- Reflection Probes for realistic reflections on metallic surfaces
- Volumetric lights to create atmospheric light beams
This setup creates an elegant and theatrical atmosphere appropriate for the ceremony.
Lighting a poetry award is like lighting a verse: each light must highlight the essential without dazzling the subtle.
Materials and textures with Shader Graph
Realistic materials are created using Shader Graph:
- Polished wood for floors and furniture with specular reflections
- Golden metal for the trophy with normal maps of fine engravings
- Velvet fabrics for curtains with variable roughness
- LED screens with emission to display fragments of Con
- Paper and books with porosity textures and natural folds
These materials respond physically to HDRP lighting.
Animation and particle systems
The ceremony is animated using:
- Timeline to coordinate camera and character movements
- Animator Controller for Miriam Reyes' arrival on stage
- Particle Systems for confetti, light sparkles, and poetic paper bits
- Animated Shaders for screens displaying changing verses
- Audio Synchronization to coordinate effects with applause
These combined elements create a visually dynamic celebration.
Interactivity and narrative experience
Unity allows transforming the scene into an interactive experience:
- First-person controller to freely explore the hall
- Triggers that activate audio explanations about the awarded work
- Interactables like books that reveal poems when approached
- Cinemachine for automatic cinematic shots
- UI Canvas with biographical information and fragments of Con
Users can experience the ceremony at their own pace.
Optimization and final deployment
The project is optimized for multiple platforms:
- Occlusion Culling to improve performance in interiors
- LOD Groups for complex models like the trophy
- Texture compression balancing quality and performance
- Build Settings for WebGL, desktop, and mobile devices
The final experience celebrates not only an award, but the power of digital poetry.
While critics debate the value of contemporary poetry, we debate why light baking takes longer than writing an epic poem. At least our digital verses will never be rejected by publishers... only by compilers. 😅