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Ambient Ambient City Content

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What is Ambient City?

Ambient City is a curated collection of characters, animations, and demo-ready content designed specifically for background population, crowds, and ambient storytelling in Unity projects.

The focus is not on hero characters or bespoke animation sets, but on:

  • believable city life

  • efficient reuse

  • rapid scene dressing

  • “drop-in and it works” workflows

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Where does the content come from?

Some of the character models and animations in Ambient City originate from the Rocketbox character libraries, which were historically created for real-time applications and exported from 3ds Max and open sourced by Microsoft (under the MIT license) on March 30, 2020

The original description from the release:

The Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar library consists of 115 characters and avatars fully rigged and with high definition that was developed over the course of 10 years. The diversity of the characters and the quality of the rigging together with a relatively low-poly meshes, makes this library the go-to asset among research laboratories worldwide from crowd simulation to real-time avatar embodiment and social Virtual Reality (VR). Ever since their launch, laboratories around the globe have been using the library and many of the lead authors in the VR community have extensively used these avatars during their research.

The announcement about the release here> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/microsoft-rocketbox-avatar-library-now-available-for-research-and-academic-use/arrow-up-right

This release goes together with a paper that highlights and documents the creation of the library and reviews the research done with rigged avatars as well as explains the importance of having rigged avatars for Virtual Reality. If you are using this library for research you should consider citing it.

These assets have been used widely in:

  • visualization

  • simulation

  • games

  • architectural and cinematic previs

They are solid, production-proven assets - but they were not originally authored for modern Unity pipelines.

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Why repackage and reorganize them?

Out of the box, these libraries tend to be:

  • monolithic (huge downloads)

  • inconsistently structured

  • difficult to preview

  • tedious to integrate into a modern Unity workflow

Ambient City exists to solve those problems by:

  • Breaking content into focused packages

    • Characters

    • Animations

    • Demo scenes

  • Standardizing folder layout and naming

  • Providing ready-to-use demo scenes

  • Making animation coverage visible and explorable

  • Ensuring consistent import behavior

In short: we’ve done the cleanup and organization work so you don’t have to.

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Are these assets modified?

The original meshes and animations are not artistically altered.

However, some technical corrections are applied automatically during import to address known issues caused by legacy export settings (see the Rocketbox Import Fix documentation for details).

These fixes:

  • do not change the source files

  • only affect Ambient City assets

  • ensure correct behavior inside Unity

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Why split into multiple packages?

Unity Asset Store has practical constraints around:

  • download size

  • update cadence

  • user intent

Splitting Ambient City into multiple packs allows you to:

  • download only what you need

  • update characters or animations independently

  • avoid pulling in large demo scenes unnecessarily

All packs are designed to work together seamlessly if you install more than one.

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Will installing multiple Ambient City packs cause conflicts?

No.

Shared scripts and utilities are intentionally designed to:

  • live in a common folder

  • deduplicate correctly when multiple packs are imported

  • “just work” regardless of import order

You won’t end up with duplicated systems or broken references.

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Who is this for?

Ambient City is ideal if you need:

  • background pedestrians

  • crowd idles and conversations

  • city life for open worlds, hubs, or scenes

  • believable population without bespoke animation work

It is not intended to replace:

  • hero character rigs

  • custom animation pipelines

  • cinematic-quality bespoke performances

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The philosophy

Ambient City is about practical realism.

Not every character needs to be special - but they should all feel like they belong.

By organizing, documenting, and modernizing this content, we aim to make it:

  • easier to use

  • easier to understand

  • easier to trust

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