Projects

Koi Fish

This is the project displayed on the home page. This was a larger endeavor than I thought initally. Some of the core things I learned/used in this project were:

• Mesh Instancing
• GTLF 2.0
• Blender (yes I learned 3D modeling for this)
• Vertex and Fragment shaders (offloading onto the GPU)
• Boids algorithm for flocking(?) fish

Boids by itself fairly trivial, but an additional requirement I made was for the fish to A) have boundary logic, and B) also swim for food when the user feeds them. This made the project a bit more challenging. Also, you might have noticed if you refreshed the page a couple times, is that the koi fish color patterns are random. I did this by applying a 3d Simplex noise function to the fish with per instance random offsets in the vertex shader. Colorful (and unique) fish!

I also learned how to 3D model, and to create materials. I happily embraced the low-poly style since anything more would be way too difficult.

In '_banner_pixelated.js', I attempted to make a pixel-art styled renderer for this, but it didn't feel quite right so I scrapped it.