Skip to content
AI Pixel Wizard
Your sequence0 clips
Source

The Drawing That Breathes

A horse gathers from graphite dust on rough ivory paper, breathes quietly, and lets its mane drift away as floating charcoal. A charcoal drawing that comes to life.

Background, V1 Effects3D178 lines of codev1.0.0

In Nature & weather, Art & illustration styles, Made for phones

Next: A Door Into Four SeasonsSurprise me

The Drawing That Breathes preview
Starting live preview…
00:00:00:00 / 00:00:00:01

Live, running the real source at reduced resolution.

Combine several clips and hand them over together from your sequence.

A finished film

It plays exactly as rendered and has nothing to adjust. The preview runs the same code your AI receives.

View code Sample video (1.2 MB)
Info

What it is

A graceful horse assembles out of graphite dust on rough ivory paper. First there is a faint outline, then a cloud of smudged charcoal gathers into the body, and the head, legs and tail resolve. The chest rises and falls in a quiet breath while strands of mane and breath lift away as drifting charcoal. Smudged shading, eraser highlights, crosshatching and separate strands for the mane and tail are all drawn in the shader. The film has no settings.

Reuse it in your own idea

  • Artist reel opener: the outline-to-horse build takes about the first three seconds.
  • Textured card: hold the finished horse and lay a title across the empty paper above it.
  • Pair it with the other hand-made Impossible Worlds for an "art styles" sequence.

Which part is reusable

src/charcoal-horse.js is the ingredient your AI reuses. demo.js is only the example scene around it, and uses the demo harness only for the demo.

Good to know

  • The film is finished: it has no settings. To change colours or timing, edit the shader.
  • It is composed for a 4:5 portrait frame.
  • The end does not return to the start, so repeating it is a hard cut.

Technical details

Technical details
Implementation
Three.js 0.185.1 (WebGL) · ES module src/charcoal-horse.js
Exports
  • createCharcoalHorse() => { scene, camera, setSize(width, height), update(time), dispose() }
Dependencies (exact)
  • three@0.185.1 (source) — Renderer and a full-screen shader material.
  • apw-runtime@1.0.0 (demo) — Demo harness.
How it fits a scene

Coordinates: Composed for a 4:5 portrait frame and measured by the frame height: in a wider frame the picture stays centred at full height and its background fills the sides; in a narrower one, such as 9:16, the sides are cropped.

Lighting: Soft, even paper light: graphite shading, eraser highlights and a faint smudge under the hooves.

Timing: An outline appears, charcoal dust gathers into the body, head, legs and tail, the chest breathes, and mane strands and breath lift away as dust.

Output
1080×1350, 30 fps, 8 s · procedural (computed from the frame number) · not a loop — A one-shot film: it builds to a finished picture that holds to the last frame, so the end does not return to the start.
Tested
Rendered 240 frames on 2026-10-10 in Chrome 154.0.8037.97 headless on Linux 7.0.0-38-generic (x64), Node 22.14.0 (WebGL 2 via SwiftShader (software)). Same frame twice from fresh pages: identical.
Performance
One full-screen fragment shader. About 61 ms a frame at 1080 by 1350 on an integrated Intel GPU (Iris Xe), and about 3 to 5 s a frame with software WebGL. Real-time playback at full size needs a discrete or recent integrated GPU; on weaker graphics use the rendered video, or draw into a smaller canvas.
Export a video yourself
Download the source, then in the folder: npm install npm run render -- charcoal-horse/1.0.0 --out my-video.mp4Needs Node 18+, ffmpeg and Chrome/Chromium. Add --params my-settings.json (from Copy settings) for your own settings.
Version
1.0.0 · sha256:64bc3653563ab4d4…
Files
License
MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 AI Pixel Wizard. Released under the MIT License. See LICENSE in this folder. License details
Provenance
From the owner's collection Twenty Impossible Worlds: the original GLSL ES 3.00 shader of the film “The Drawing That Breathes”, created with ChatGPT / Codex and used as published, wrapped for AI Pixel Wizard as a three.js full-screen shader in October 2026. The collection's synthesised soundtrack is not part of this ingredient.
BinMore like this

More like this

Play these full screen