Step into
the living world

Lab 03 · a design study. Scene fully procedural, zero assets.

How it's built

The scene is 100% procedural Three.js: no model files, no image assets. The arches are torus geometry with seeded noise pushed through their vertices once at build time. The moss is a canvas texture painted at runtime. The sun and moon are glow sprites, and the day-night cycle is a single GSAP timeline that drives the key light's position, color, and intensity along with the fog and sky. Even the butterfly is two planes flapping on a sine wave.

// every arch: a half-torus, displaced once at build time
const geo = new THREE.TorusGeometry(def.radius, def.tube, 40, 180, Math.PI);
jitter(geo, 0.1, i * 7.13 + 1.7); // seeded trig noise through the vertices

// the moss: a canvas painted at runtime, reused as map + bump
const mossTex = new THREE.CanvasTexture(makeMossCanvas(1234));

Shadows are real (PCF shadow maps, 4096px sun, 2048px moon), and the periodic "scan" effect is just the materials flipping into wireframe and back.

The EXPLORE button flies the camera along a Catmull-Rom spline whose approach, anchor, and exit points are derived from each threaded arch's own transform, so every pass stays perpendicular to the opening: out through the big left arch, a tangent-matched arc that crests over the back field, then home through the right arch, while the fov pushes 42 to 38 and back for the zoom. The control points are clearance-verified against every arch tube, and the flight hands control back to the mouse parallax without a pop.

The flora is grown, not modeled: grass tufts are instanced cards painted on canvas (blade gradients and all) scattered in noise-thresholded drifts, with real tapered blades instanced in the near field, a vertex-shader sway, and a sun-backlit lift patched into the material. Mushrooms cluster at the arch feet, vines hang clear of the flight corridor, fireflies drift between the arches, and the whole frame passes through a subtle UnrealBloom pass so dew, spores, and the sun and moon sprites glow. A last fullscreen pass adds film grain, a dither and the vignette after tone mapping.