Rune Stones / Runic Transliterator

ᚱᚢᚾᛟ (/ˈruː.nɔː/) - Runo - Proto-Germanic for "rune".

My girlfriend and I share a deep interest in runes and general Germanic history / culture. She loves the aesthetics and mysticality of it, and sometimes even uses runes for practicing witchcraft. 🤫
I, on the other hand, am fascinated by history and language. Naturally, I learned how to read and write the Elder Futhark and transliterate modern German into runic languages practically overnight.

Sometimes, my girlfriend asks me to convert her texts into runes for certain projects. However, this can be quite tedious for longer texts.
So, what better solution than creating a tool to do it for me?
Of course, it's not perfect since transliteration is based on phonetics rather than letters. But with the help of some simple programming, it gets pretty close!

The tool works best with German, since English frequently uses the “th” sound ( Thurisaz - ᚦ ) and there are also a lot of words where an h follows the t without it being the "ᚦ" sound.

The tool also offers the option to enable or disable double letters. Double runes were not commonly used in runic languages, but modern German has numerous double consonants and vowels. Depending on your preference, you can choose to display double runes or not.
Although there are characters for all runes in the Unicode Character Set (UCS), there aren't many fonts that support them. Hence, I created my own font by hand. You don’t want your own software to use ugly fonts after all.
Additionally, I took this opportunity to gain experience in using the localization features of the Unity Engine. Oh yeah, I used Unity to create this simple program because, why not? It's easy to quickly create UI elements with it.
The first slide showcases some runes carved and painted into amethyst stones. I created them using Blender and the Cycles renderer since the material didn't look right in Eevee. Also, since it was procedural, rendering in Eevee was quite slow.

The combination of textures was achieved using a mask. So a simple black and white texture on the UV-Map of these stones. The black parts are amethyst, the white parts are paint. Using a little bump node in the correct configuration and the runes seem to be carved into the stone!