This summer season’s Olympics in Paris revived an outdated story that Ubisoft’s fashions of Notre-Dame cathedral, made for 2014’s Assassin’s Creed Unity, had helped rebuild the cathedral after it caught fireplace in 2019.
Individuals have been saying this because the fireplace, and I made a YouTube video debunking it in 2021. However weirdly, not everybody on this planet has seen it, and movies claiming in any other case proceed to garner hundreds of views on TikTok.
So let’s debunk it once more.
One of many first shops to unfold this story was NME. Right here’s what it published in 2019:
It’s additionally believed that French writer Ubisoft nonetheless holds the unique 3D fashions and pictures which might assist with rebuilding the cathedral. Ubisoft is but to touch upon the claims and a full restoration plan for Notre-Dame hasn’t been confirmed.
Now, that doesn’t sound very sure, does it? Properly, veteran video games journalist Keza MacDonald, writing for The Guardian, noticed this and reached out to Ubisoft for remark. She published the response from a Ubisoft spokesperson, which most likely ought to have been the ultimate phrase on the matter:
We aren’t presently concerned within the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, however we’d be very happy to lend our experience in any method that we will to assist with these efforts. […] You will need to remember that what we did for the sport was not a scientific reconstruction however slightly a creative imaginative and prescient.
However regardless of that fairly clear response, the rumors about the Notre-Dame fashions endured. They have been additional unfold by an ArtStation blog post from 2023, which is presently one of many first issues that comes up once you Google this matter. It’s written by an artist who doesn’t appear to be related to Ubisoft, and doesn’t present sources for the claims that he makes within the piece.
In 2019, Ubisoft was saying it wasn’t concerned within the restoration. If it had been, I consider the corporate would have rightfully made an enormous deal about it. Very similar to it did with a news release on the time through which it introduced that it was donating €500,000 to Notre-Dame, and giving freely Home windows PC copies of Unity for per week. The corporate additionally made its stance fairly clear: It inspired individuals to discover Notre-Dame within the sport, and donate to the restoration effort if they might.
Now let’s take a look at what Ubisoft builders have mentioned about how they designed the cathedral. Senior degree artist Caroline Miousse is the individual extensively credited with constructing Unity’s Notre-Dame. She’s been interviewed by Destructoid in addition to IGN, and Ubisoft’s information weblog additionally did an intensive interview together with her that has since been republished by Siggraph.
Miousse was requested what references she labored from to construct the cathedral, and right here’s what she mentioned:
We have been capable of finding plenty of blueprints exhibiting us precisely how Notre-Dame was constructed. [Maxime Durand, “Assassin’s Creed” historian] helped me loads with it as a result of he has the historic background. I’ve tons of books, too. Google was additionally my greatest good friend for some time. You may simply discover a lot stuff on the web now.
The Notre-Dame that seems within the sport was altered for the sake of degree design and gameplay — and for compliance with copyright, as a result of a bunch of parts, just like the rose window and the organ, fall underneath copyright and might’t legally be recreated.
Besides, it doesn’t sound like Ubisoft made detailed scans of the cathedral to work off of. Miousse talked about pictures, blueprints, books, and Google.
You recognize who did make scans of the cathedral?
A whole lot of people that have studied it for many years!
Amongst them was Cédric Gachaud, the CEO of an organization referred to as Life3D, which was scanning the cathedral for restoration work that was ongoing earlier than the fireplace. In 2019, he spoke about it with premier French newspaper Le Monde. Yow will discover his unique quote on the hyperlink, however right here is my translation of it:
The individuals behind Assassin’s Creed did a tremendous job. However these are graphic artists, very skillful, who work based mostly on pictures and blueprints that they’ve recovered. They’re searching for a coherent visible. But when a statue is 2 meters taller than in actuality, it’s not essential for them. We’re searching for millimetric precision, we work with engineers, with knowledge analysts.
Le Monde additionally dug up a quote from the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s resident historian, Maxime Durand, who spoke with Quebecois paper La Presse about Notre-Dame’s restoration. As above, the quote is in French, and right here is my translation:
The monument we’ve recreated has a phenomenal creative liberty. I can’t say that those that are reconstructing the cathedral will essentially be all in favour of our modeling of it.
Once more, if Ubisoft had been in a position to contribute the sport’s fashions to the restoration, the corporate would have rightfully been bragging to excessive heaven about it. But it surely isn’t. Everybody concerned within the sport insists on their sport’s inventive, creative imaginative and prescient, over and over.
The cathedral restoration effort includes “fifty research teams and laboratories spread across France and brings together a total of 175 researchers,” based on the French Ministry of Culture. These people span such diverse disciplines as “archaeologists, historians, art historians, anthropologists, physicists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists.”
To additional show why this scientific work is so totally different from what Ubisoft did, we will take a look at the scans performed by the late Andrew Tallon of Vassar College. The laser know-how he used to scan the cathedral has a margin of error that’s “often fewer than five millimeters.”
That’s the type of knowledge that exists. Throughout a 2023 go to to Vassar, Philippe Villeneuve, the architect-in-chief of the Notre-Dame mission, confirmed that Tallon’s data on the cathedral’s vaulted ceilings had aided of their reconstruction.
Tallon was removed from alone in doing this work. Professor Dr. Stephen Albrecht is one other of the individuals involved in the restoration. He and his colleagues had spent 20 years engaged on the cathedral. Earlier than the fireplace, they’d been doing 3D scans of the transept, and that knowledge was given to the restoration.
Ubisoft didn’t do scans like this. As a result of it didn’t want to. As a result of the cathedral within the sport is a creative creation that captures what it appears like. It does really feel actual, it does really feel correct, and that’s an enormous achievement.
We don’t have to make up tales about the online game being so actually correct that it might assist rebuild Notre-Dame. It’s a discredit to the artists that made Unity’s Notre-Dame, erasing the unimaginable work that they did. And it’s a discredit to the scientists who’ve been working to grasp and preserve the true cathedral all alongside.
