Built. Unbuilt. Rebuilt.
A digital form becomes surface samples, travels through a character field, and resolves into another form. Randomize makes a short, user-requested change—not a fixed film or a slow opening sequence. The portfolio surface and orbitable workspace come from the approved interactive rose study.
The real flower
This work is based on “Rose” by Heliona, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The original attribution is preserved in the model licence and inside the GLB.
The 119,994-triangle model has four PBR materials and twelve embedded textures. The original baseline model bytes and petal/leaf materials are retained. Only one rose is shown, rather than a trio. Changes: the baseline packing and texture resizing remain; the visible rose is normalized, positioned and scaled for the workspace. During a form change, its opacity is blended into triangle-area-weighted point samples. Original material blending is restored when the rose resolves. No procedural flower substitute or photogrammetry claim is made.
The baseline model was obtained from this pinned public source directory. The asset’s author and licence are Heliona / CC BY 4.0, not the repository owner.
Sampling, motion and rebuilding
Triangle area determines where rose samples are taken. Texture colour and normal-based lighting determine their character density. Every sample has a deterministic position in the shared travelling field and a target position in the next form. Positions interpolate continuously through that field over about 3.8 seconds. This is a designed correspondence, not topology-preserving remeshing, live coding, generated source code or an AI process.
The liquid is an original parametric surface with continuously travelling deformations. The hourglass is original geometry describing two circular plates, four supports, a double-cone vessel and individual sand samples. Sand travels through the neck into the lower pile, drains once over twelve seconds and rests; selecting the hourglass again starts a new drain. These forms use 3,600 glyph samples on desktop and 2,600 on mobile. They are projected points; we do not claim one non-overlapping glyph per screen cell for these 3D forms.
The optional ASCII lens
A narrow, soft-edged lens samples the actual rendered scene on the GPU. Luminance and neighbouring edges choose among sixteen glyphs, with interpolated changes. Its travelling patch is enabled initially and can be switched off using ASCII. The cached scene texture is reused for idle lens motion, with no per-frame CPU pixel readback. This code and the control icons are original to this study; no third-party ASCII shader was copied.
Reference and limitations
The hourglass’s visible shape was informed by the supplied public Instagram thumbnail and caption. The thumbnail shows a monospaced hourglass with plates, supports and a central vessel; the caption describes assembly and draining sand. The official embed marked playback copyright-blocked. The video was not recovered or watched, and its motion is not claimed to be recreated. No reference image or video is distributed with this site.
The mathematical liquid is not a fluid simulation. The glyph point cloud approximates the sampled rose surface; it is not the original PBR mesh in another renderer. A quiet background scaffold measures the original page dimensions, not live per-grain telemetry.
Libraries and retained baseline source
- Three.js 0.181.2, MIT: rendering, PBR assets, geometry, textures and OrbitControls. Drag, wheel and pinch control the actual camera; no automatic camera path is used.
- The retained baseline THREE.BAS MIT adaptations in vendor/assembly.js and core.js describe the old reversible page fragments. The new Randomize interaction does not run that slab sequence; the original page stays assembled.
Pause freezes the moving forms and lens while leaving the camera available. Reduced-motion preference starts paused, allows an explicit Randomize transition, then settles still. No external fonts, paid assets or reference media are requested at runtime.