Verdant is a real-time WebGL film. Scroll and a seed cracks open, roots spread underground, a trunk commits, leaves unfurl, blossom opens and the season closes at golden hour. Nothing in it was downloaded: the tree is a seeded L-system generated once at load, the grass and pollen are simulated on the GPU, the sky and bark and leaves are procedural shaders, and even the typography is rasterised into a glyph atlas and drawn as geometry — there is no HTML text on the page at all. It was built to reverse-engineer how the award-winning WebGL studios put their sites together, and the whole engine is open source.
Highlights
- Procedural tree — growth is one GPU uniform, never a rebuild
- Typography rendered as geometry, with a hidden semantic DOM for crawlers
- 158 art-directed parameters with the live tuning editor shipped
- Four-tier GPU grading + adaptive resolution, smooth on integrated graphics
