Ever wonder what $1874.40 of Opus 5.5 tokens looks like? Wonder no more. I highly recommend watching the whole video on 1080p on a large screen with sound on. Pay attention to all the little details. - Birds flying and diving into the ocean. - Cloth, signs and lights swaying in the wind. - Crabs scuttling along the shore and burrowing when you get close. - Fish swimming alongside the whale. - Lights illuminating the dock at night Then zoom out and see the entire island. Never dipping below 60 FPS at 1440p resolution. Yes, there's a few bugs and visual artifacts, some textures need improving, the shorelines waves sometimes look funny, but these are so trivial to fix at this point. FYI I'm on the $200 subscription plan. This used 59% of my weekly usage and took 2h 7h of API time using multiple subagents, about 8h in real-time. There was extremely little technical direction here. 99% of my prompts were "Add X and Y" or "This looks weird, make it better". It's a great time for hobbyists, bad time for professionals. This experiment has further cemented my view that technical creatives are about to experience a massive disruption.

It was only a few weeks ago that I was posting how AI isn't very good at 3D model generation and likely won't be until we have multi-modal models. Well, Astra changed my mind. The trick is to give it a set of reference images from each side of the object you are trying to create and give it an environment where it can run the comparisons. This wasn't a one-shot, but the first pass was 90% there and only required a little fine-tuning. It also generated 10K/1K/100 triangle LODs for me and rigged it 🤯 There's a few modeling issues and self-collisions with the animation, but honestly this is good enough for what I need.

Back to working on Three.js Fire Pro for a bit. Doing some explorations on the tooling right now. I added some debug views that let you view different properties of the fluid such as heat, vorticity, smoke, oxygen, etc. You can view these by slicing the domain and viewing in 2D or as a volumetric rendering. These are mainly to help me in debugging but I will leave in since they are helpful when authoring the scenes themselves.

After much iteration I think I'm finally happy with the wake and spray effects for Water Pro v4! 💦 I've made it super tunable so it's easy to tune the effects exactly how you want them.

Nobody has taught me more about positivity and engagement than @garyvee. And I still think about this clip all the time. Even makes me a little teary-eyed. Because it's so true: YOU'RE SOMEBODY NOW! ❤️

I was working on content for the Three.js Grassworks homepage and put all 12 grass presets together. After spending so much time building this, seeing them side by side feels pretty special. Sometimes you just stop and appreciate how far it’s come. #threejs# #webgpu#

If you want to see how crazy these new models are, you'll want to read this. I built a wooden crane for my kids, but was struggling with the actual mechanical design of the carriage and lift mechanisms. I spent a few weeks trying to figure out the design and bought a bunch of parts off Amazon I knew I would need (bearings, timing belt, etc.), but designing the whole system was a bit above my pay grade. I decided to hand all of the measurements to Astra, gave it a rough idea of what I wanted and the Amazon links to the parts I bought. It thought for a bit and then asked me a few questions on the design I had failed to provide. It figured out the part numbers, looked up the datasheets to grab the dimensions, and asked me to provide dimensions that it couldn't find. We iterated a few times, aligning the design with what I had pictured in my head. The initial design was more complex than I needed and too bulky. But I hadn't given it any constraints on the size of the assembly, so I wasn't surprised. It took each piece of feedback in stride and updated the design in a sensible way. In the end, it generated some PDFs documenting the entire assembly and generated STEP files for all of the 3D parts I needed to print. The level of spatial and engineering understanding needed to do this is probably beyond what the average graduate coming out of a 4 year engineering school is capable of. I think we are on the cusp of an engineering revolution in the same way that CAD tools replaced drafting tables. This is a general purpose model that isn't even specifically trained to do this task and I gave it some horrible, underspecified prompts. Imagine what could be achieved with a custom-tailored model?

Three.js Water Pro is making Subnautica in the browser a real possibility. Rewrote the lighting model so light reflecting off the ocean floor is now refracted and attenuated based on real-world physics. Still can't believe what a difference it makes🤯

Three.js Water Pro V3 is launching soon! 🚀 I am putting together a migration guide since the new updates introduced a few breaking changes. You can also point your agent at this document and it can help do the migration for you.

I was watching some Subnautica 2 footage and it made me realize I'm not refracting the light coming off the bottom of the ocean. I really wish I would stop finding these things so I can get v3 released!🤦🏻‍♂️

To support determinism in Three.js Water Pro, I had to switch to a fixed 60 Hz update rate for the wave sim. An unintended side effect of this is the average FPS has increased by a few % since I'm now doing less work on average when FPS > 60, since some frames skip the wave sim. Overall, the next version should see a 15-20% improvement in performance thanks to some other optimizations I made! 🔥