Field note 02 · Cushion & crust
Moss keeps the record
A cushion of moss grown over lichen-crusted stone is an instrument: its depth reads rainfall, its bald patches read drought. The reference plate the whole scene is composed against.
01 / FIELD NOTES
Plates from the floor
of the wood
Two photographs resolve the way the scene does — a stepped transmission in which sampled pixel-dots gather along the advancing edge, then hand over to the live image.
Field note 07 · After the rain
Painted by the seed
No photograph was downloaded for this plate — it is painted onto a canvas at boot by the same mulberry32 stream that grows the roots, so it is identical on every load.
02 / BUTTON STUDIES
Liquid metal,
sandboxed twice
Two isolated studies of molten-surface buttons, each mounted in an opaque-origin sandboxed iframe. Their WebGL contexts, timers and pointer state cannot leak into the moss scene — the original page insisted on exactly this isolation.
STUDY A — sdPILL / VERMILION-TO-GOLD DOMAIN WARP / HOVER SWIRL
STUDY B — SDSPHERE / SLOW CONVECTION / PLAY-THE-FILM CONTROL
03 / ANATOMY
One seed,
every reload
Everything below is measured from the running scene on this page — nothing is hard-coded except the seed.
—Instanced blades
—Triangles / frame
—Draw calls
0x5EED
C0DEMulberry32 seed
C0DEMulberry32 seed
- Swept tubesThe root and its arch are tapered tubes swept along Catmull-Rom centrelines with parallel-transport frames; recursive offshoots fork two generations deep, and every control point is jittered by the seeded stream.
- Fur plantingBlades are drawn from a cell distribution weighted by area × moss-depth over each limb's tessellated shell, so density follows the cushion rather than the parameterisation. One draw call via THREE.InstancedMesh.
- Living groundThe pointer is raycast onto the crown plane and pushed into each root's local space; the fur shader pushes blades tangentially and presses them down inside a falloff, while a ring-buffered pollen emitter spawns by distance travelled, integrated on the GPU.
- Determinismmulberry32(0x5EEDC0DE) drives all placement; the value-noise lattice uses integer hashing, never sin(). Same world, every load, every device.
Reduced-motion visitors get a single composed frame: no wind, no trail, no survey pulse — and every word of this page visible immediately.