Komorebi木漏れ日

Sunlight that leaks through the leaves of trees — and the soft, shifting dapples it scatters on the ground.

Komorebi recreates the feeling you get when sitting under a tree, feeling the shadows, the inner calm. The world organized chaotically scrambles as the wind blows, and then peacefully goes back into its proper arrangement, the way nature wants it to be

How it’s made

Most of the bright shapes on the ground are not the shapes of the gaps between the leaves: each small gap in the canopy acts as a pinhole, so every dapple is an image of the sun. The sun is about half a degree wide, which is why those images are soft; komorebi scatters many small suns across it, lets each one cast a sharp shadow, and sums them. The leaves are really where they are, held in a few layers at different depths. Wind moves the trunk, limbs and twigs as damped springs, so a gust slides the whole pattern sideways and, when it dies, everything returns to where it started.

The whole model is written down in the spec, beside the source.

On your own page

The engine is a standalone WebGL2 script that you put on your own server and point at a canvas. The examples show a page background, a panel, and the ES-module route.

Arboretum

Looks are kept in arboretum, grouped into playlists and shared.

Made with love and peace and harmony by José Albornoz, from Canada.