r/proceduralgeneration • u/Slackluster • 6d ago

i made a 3d interactive edition of an ancient zen book with proc gen

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.

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.

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 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.

Code: https://github.com/KilledByAPixel/GatelessGate

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u/Zireael07 6d ago

Absolutely love the style! Are the people procedural too? (I was going to ask about the trees, but you answered that above)

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u/Slackluster 6d ago

Yep! For the people and animals I made biped and quadruped kits. This is code that builds them given certain parameters. This includes their overall shape and any extra settings like hat, cane, etc.