i used threejs to make a 3d interactive edition of an ancient zen book
The Gateless Gate is a collection of 49 koans, short cryptic stories about Zen Buddhism from 13th century China. It's one of the strangest books ever written and one of my favorites. I decided to give it a major modern upgrade.
https://killedbyapixel.github.io/GatelessGate/
The concept was to create a custom 3D scene for each koan that demonstrates it in a visual way. I went with a super minimal ancient scroll look, but each page has a red accent object that responds in some way when you touch it.
There's a debug panel you can open by pressing HOME, which lets you play with the settings (press HOME again to close it). The rendering uses depth edge lines for the outline effect, and there are a lot of other pieces in there (paper shader, grass, water, ocean).
This is also an experiment in generative art. Nothing is downloaded: every model, scene and sound is built by code when the page loads, so the whole thing is about 1.5 MB. There are 45 models in the kit and most of them are created procedurally. The 5 animals share a quadruped rig, trees grow from a recursive branching function, grass is a noise field, and so on. The soundscape is generated the same way, with no samples anywhere: wind, bells, chimes, rain and ocean, all created in real time.
This was a really fun project to work on and different from stuff I have made before. It was a ton of work but it feels good to see my vision realized, and I hope people enjoy it.
