Skip to content

A Flower Made of Ink

A single indigo drop blooms into a detailed peony on cotton paper: petals unfurl, a calligraphic stem and veined leaves grow, and gold pollen rises.

Background, V1 Effects3D190 lines of codev1.0.0

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

Next: A Door Into Four SeasonsSurprise me

A Flower Made of Ink 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.

Info

What it is

One drop of indigo ink lands on warm cotton paper and blooms into a botanical peony. Forty-two overlapping petals open one by one, each with pooled pigment and fine veins; a calligraphic stem and two veined leaves grow downward; in the last seconds a few specks of gold pollen rise from the centre. It is a one-shot 12-second film that holds the finished flower. The film has no settings.

Reuse it in your own idea

  • Greeting video: the flower is complete by about 9 s, which leaves three seconds to hold with a message.
  • Brand opener: a drop-to-bloom reveal that suits a logo landing on the empty paper.
  • Calm background: hold the last frame as a still for a poster or a thumbnail.

Which part is reusable

src/ink-flower.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/ink-flower.js
Exports
  • createInkFlower() => { 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: None: pigment on paper, with pooled darker edges and fine veins.

Timing: A drop lands, the petals open one by one, the stem and leaves grow, and gold pollen rises in the last seconds.

Output
1080×1350, 30 fps, 12 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 360 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 9 ms a frame at 1080 by 1350 on an integrated Intel GPU (Iris Xe), and about 5 to 10 s a frame with software WebGL. Plays at 30 frames a second at full size on an integrated GPU.
Export a video yourself
Download the source, then in the folder: npm install npm run render -- ink-flower/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 · sha256:0f4b28c9acc63d36…
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 “A Flower Made of Ink”, 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