Stamen Studio

A live-coding studio for small 3D worlds drawn in ink. A script builds a scene from one grammar of shapes, the scene runs on the GPU as you type, and every knob in the script is a slider.

• One grammar of shapes: solid() stacks rings up a height, so a cube, a gem, an obelisk and a mesa are the same thing with different sides, profiles and twists. arc() sweeps gates and bridges; stack(), around() and row() compose the rest.
• Land, sky and weather: deserts with dunes and mesas, meadows cut into striped fields, water levels that turn a meadow into a bog, clouds, beams, auroras and a ringed planet on the horizon.
• Things that live: plants grown from a single apex with phyllotaxis and apical dominance, bees that forage and dance the bearing of a flower, boid swarms, and fireflies that pull each other into sync.
• One wind: a single field bends every blade and petal on the GPU and drifts the bees and seeds on the CPU; Overlay draws it as arrows.
• Knobs that edit the code: every param() shows up in the Params panel, and moving a slider rewrites its literal in the script. Errors point at their line.
• See the graph: the Graph view shows the node tree the script built, with pass timings, merged duplicate nodes and the nodes that lambdas produced while the scene ran.

Thirteen examples come with it: a dream desert, the shape grammar, swamp moonlight, jungle ruins, cybernetic insects, a radio array of interstellar hopes, an aurora tundra, a pastoral, a meadow, wind, growth, a hive and a single bloom. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom; on a phone the panes become tabs.