Aurelia

Realtime procedural jellyfish in the browser using three.js WebGPURenderer.

See it running live here!

Jellyfish were always my favourite creatures as their hypnotic movements and geometric simplicity make them the ideal subject for creative coding. Almost 15 years ago I built a jellyfish game in actionscript/flash with the same name. You can find it running in a flash emulator here here, although unfortunately the emulation is buggy and does not work on touch screens. Now I wanted to revisit the topic with the power of WebGPU.

Implementation details

The bell is formed by a sinusoidally contracting hemisphere, while the bell seam, oral arms and tentacles are simulated using a verlet particle system that is evaluated on the GPU with compute shaders. All textures and the fake volumetric lighting are also procedurally generated in the shaders.

How to run

npm install
npm run dev

Standing on the shoulders of giants

A lot of great creative jellyfish demos have inspired this, most importantly:

Chrysaora by Aki Rodic

Particulate Medusae by Ash Weeks

Luminescence by BigWings