Assassin’s Creed Unity: Ubisoft can’t help rebuild Notre-Dame cathedral

In April 2019, a fire started in Paris’ Notre-Dame cathedral. It engulfed the spire and the wooden roof, weakened the stone vault, and endangered the western towers’ massive bells.

Although extensive damage was done to the cathedral, French President Emmanuel Macron promised it would be repaired.

I was surprised to see a number of articles claiming that the widely-maligned 2014 videogame is at risk. Assassin’s Creed Unity This could be a step in the right direction. Didn’t Ubisoft have some incredibly detailed 3D models of the cathedral lying around? Couldn’t architects, historians, and artisans make use of these boons?

Well, no.

Ubisoft made a donation of €500,000 to the restoration effort and made UnityFree on PC for one week However, the company did not say that they were giving over their plans or models. When asked by The Guardian, a Ubisoft spokesperson said that the company wasn’t involved in the reconstruction, but said, “We would be more than happy to lend our expertise in any way that we can to help with these efforts.”

So basically, “Sure, if they ask us.” Experts also quashed the rumor — in French and in English.

The fantasy persists. There’s a beautiful narrative to it! Assassin’s Creed UnityThe app was ridiculed for its bugs, poor optimization and companion app. It also caused controversy due to a shortage of co-op women characters models. Unity’s poor reception was blamed for weak sales of Assassin’s Creed SyndicateNext year. Wouldn’t it be poetic, then, for the game to bring something beautiful into this world, and help restore Notre-Dame?

Why it wouldn’t work

Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft via Polygon

Ubisoft was forced to adjust when the Notre-Dame cathedral was built. Assassin’s Creed Unity. Although Thomas Becket might tell you otherwise, cathedrals aren’t designed with MurderKeep that in mind. But for the sake of Assassin’s Creed, Notre-Dame had to be.

Caroline Miousse was an artist at the senior level. Unity at developer Ubisoft Montreal, and she spent two years working on the game’s rendition of Notre-Dame. In interviews on Ubisoft’s blog and with Destructoid, she discussed the ways in which the team tweaked the cathedral to give the player greater mobility.

“We added things like cables and incense across the second level of Notre Dame so players would be able to move around easier when they’re above the ground,” Miousse told UbiBlog. On the top levels of the cathedral, there are windows that can swing open. Gilt panels on the balustrades of the tribune and along the nave guide the player’s movements.

Mobility is key in Assassin’s Creed, so Unity’s departures from real life didn’t stop at Notre-Dame. In an interview with The Verge, art director Mohamed Gambouz explained that the developers needed to smooth out the pointy medieval rooftops of 18th-century Paris so as not to break the player’s parkour flow.

Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft via Polygon

Designers of games must also be able to deal with technical limitations. For example, each tympanum above Notre-Dame’s main doors is full of intricate sculptures depicting biblical scenes. The tympana, however, is not rendered with all of these sculptures in 3D. Unity Flat are not possible. Designers created textures with beautiful texture that appear sculpted. It’s an optimization technique that looks great and doesn’t compromise immersion — unless you get really close and swing the camera around to break the illusion. A jerk who is trying to record footage for YouTube would not do such a thing.

France’s issues with copyright

Speaking of those sculptures, they’re not identical to the ones that appear on the physical cathedral. Actually, the artwork is not identical to any of those on the cathedral’s actual exterior. Unity’s Notre-Dame is authentic to real life — none of the sculptures, none of the paintings, none of the detailing in the rose windows. That’s due in part to France’s copyright laws.

Copyright can bind French monuments, as illustrated by the Eiffel Tower. The tower itself is well out of copyright — it was completed in 1889. However, the night lights which run across it were put in place in 1989. They’re still under copyright, so the visual of the illuminated Eiffel Tower can’t be used in commercial works without a license.

Notre-Dame also finds herself in similar circumstances. It’s owned by the French state, not by the Catholic Church, and it’s a designated historic monument, to boot, one that’s continually being restored. A lot of the cathedral’s contents are under copyright restrictions.

In the UbiBlog interview, Miousse singled out Notre-Dame’s great organ: “It’s just so huge and beautiful… and copyrighted. We couldn’t reproduce it exactly, but we could still try to nail the feeling you get when you see it.”

The rose windows are similarly affected by copyright — although I surmise that technical limitations also led the designers here. Art is everywhere. Unity’s rose windows is different from that of the real Notre-Dame, And the images are reused throughout the windows’ panes. Again, this makes sense: The look and feel of the stained glass is preserved, and you’re only going to notice the art is different if you’re actively looking for it.

Miousse saw the restrictions on copyright as a way to be creative. “It gave me the opportunity to create Something new from a starting point that people know and understand. It was a very interesting challenge and I had a lot of fun with it,” she told UbiBlog.

Modeling Notre-Dame

Between the copyright issues and the alterations made for technical and gameplay considerations, it’s pretty clear that the Notre-Dame that was modeled for Unity isn’t accurate enough to help real-life researchers restoring the damaged cathedral.

Those changes made the cathedral better for the game, but even if they hadn’t been made, it’s still super unlikely that Ubisoft’s work would be relevant here. As Cédric Gachaud told Le Monde, “[The game’s designers are] looking for a coherent visual … we’re looking for millimetric precision.” His company, Life3D, was working on 3D models of Notre-Dame before the fire.

But aren’t there scans, or diagrams, or something These coherent visuals are the backbone of our website. Assassin’s Creed Unity? Ubisoft declined to comment for this story, but from the research I’ve Done, it seems that the development team worked mainly off of photographs and old blueprints.

“You really have to take a bunch of pictures of everything and put them all together like a puzzle,” Miousse told UbiBlog. She said she used “tons of books” and spoke to Ubisoft’s resident art historian, Maxime Durand. At Destructoid, Brett Makedonski described her putting the cathedral together “brick by brick.”

“The monument that we recreated takes great artistic liberty,” Durand told Le Monde.

The “millimetric” 3D models that doAcademic research is the source of many such models. Andrew Tallon, an art historian, created a famous Notre-Dame model. Tallon spent many years scanning the cathedral laser scanning it, collecting data and creating high-resolution photos. And he wasn’t alone: Not long before before the cathedral caught fire, art historian Stephan Albrecht and his team had been scanning the transept, and making their own models.

Both Tallon’s and Albrecht’s data is being used in the reconstruction, and the cathedral is still being scanned and photographed to this very day.

Because no model is perfect, all this effort is needed. It is still necessary to combine laser-scanned data into a model. This model must then be opened by other researchers who use different computers in order to find different information.

Even with the most precise scans possible, restoration of the cathedral is still going to require the expertise of skilled stonemasons, woodworkers and other craftsmen. These are just the first steps.

Changes we see, changes we don’t

Notre-Dame is not a stationary object. It’s encased within amber.

Today, the Notre-Dame of France that was present during the French Revolution is unrecognizable. In 1726 the original gargoyles disappeared. The nave’s stained glass was replaced with white glass — to better illuminate the interior — in the 1750s. Jennifer Feltman assistant professor of medieval arts and architecture at University of Alabama, says that a significant portion of the central tympanum of the western façade was removed in 1770s to make it more convenient to bring things in during processions. The cathedral’s ornamentation was removed, as well as statues and other decorations, once the revolution had begun. The rows of biblical kings were torn down and beheaded, and weren’t found again until the 1970s.

This is all a fantasy. Assassin’s Creed UnityIt is located during the revolution. True to history, though, in the game’s fiction, the cathedral is being used as a sort of storage facility after being seized from the Catholic Church.

You can also make other modifications Unity’s Notre-Dame, if you’re looking for them. Red Door (a medieval entryway on the northern façade) is gone. And the sacristy on the cathedral’s southern side is similarly gone.

Miousse also made a major and anachronistic alteration to Notre-Dame’s in-game version: she added the spire.

Notre-Dame’s original spire was built from wood, and by the time the revolution rolled around, it was decrepit. After numerous attempts to figure out what was going wrong, it was finally torn down in the 1790s — likely within the time frame when Unity takes place.

There would be no spire on Notre-Dame until architects Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc undertook a restoration in the mid-19th century. Viollet -le-Duc was the founder of modern building restoration. He wanted to preserve the cathedral’s medieval heritage, but to do that, he needed to modernize it. He installed lead rain gutters with gargoyle rainspouts to make it more appealing. Hey, if they’d had this technology in 1200, they would’ve done it too.

Viollet-le-Duc’s new spire was 59 feet taller than the original, and made of wood coated in lead. Its base was decorated with metal apostle statues. This was the spire that burned in 2019, and it’s also the one that appears in Assassin’s Creed Unity — a game that is set some 70 years before the spire existed.

Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft via Polygon

“The spire is one of the big, immediately noticeable changes,” Miousse told UbiBlog. “You see [Notre-Dame] and can recognize it immediately, and part of that is due to the massive spire.” Had the cathedral’s roof been historically accurate in Unity — i.e., spireless — players would have missed out on the experience of seeing and climbing a monument they recognize.

After the fire, the real spire became the center of some controversy. Macron launched an architectural contest in which he wondered whether it wouldn’t be more beneficial to replace the spire with contemporary architecture. A glass spire was proposed, as well as a roof garden and a beam of light. The French Senate passed a bill instructing the restoration team to restore the cathedral as it was found.

So, the medieval cathedral has been restored with the famous 1800s spire.

This emotional reaction shows why Ubisoft’s version of the cathedral works so well. It doesn’t MatterThe Red Door and sacristy have been removed. It doesn’t matter that the sculptures are all wrong, and it doesn’t matter that the rose windows look different.

The reason? Feelings Notre-Dame exists. The game barely asks you to suspend disbelief — it Feels true.

Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft via Polygon

The team is behind this emotional reality. UnityThat was what I wanted. “I can re-create every single little detail of Notre Dame, but I also want to talk to people who have been there so I can know what it’s supposed to Please feel like,” Miousse told UbiBlog. She added, “I needed to keep the feeling and the emotions, while making sure it was still recognizable.”

Similarly, Gambouz told The Verge that historical accuracy wasn’t the priority for Ubisoft. The main goal, he said, was to “convey a believable setting, a believable city.” For many players, that emotional truth is translated as historical accuracy.

It’s a fascinating parlor trick — a litmus test for our own relationship with Paris, with the cathedral. Although the Red Door or the Sacristy are not part of Notre-Dame, it is the spire.

Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft via Polygon

As I captured footage of UnityThis video was made because I am amazed at how the stained glass bounces colorful light on the walls. Marble is beautiful in texture. The developers took care to make sure the skyline that you can make out through the stained glass windows matches the one you’ll see when you step outside the cathedral.

Unity’s Notre-Dame doesn’t You are requiredIt is a 1-to-1 re-creation. That’s a totally unnecessary burden to put on a video game. For that, we have researchers, scientists and academics.

But there’s real value in the way this virtual Notre-Dame makes us feel. It creates curiosity, familiarity, wonder and excitement. It accomplishes what it is supposed to.

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