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Printing Press

A hand press inks its type, slides in a sheet, presses it with the platen and slides the printed page out. Loops perfectly.

3D object, V2 Objects3DSeamless loop, verified130 lines of codev1.0.0

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Printing Press preview
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14

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Info

What it is

A hand press, printing a sheet every loop. An inked roller rolls across the forme of metal type, a blank sheet is lifted from the pile on the left and slid onto the bed, the iron platen comes down on a turning screw and presses the sheet against the type, rises, and the printed sheet is slid out onto the pile on the right. Choose the wood (oak, walnut or pine), the ink (black, red, blue or sepia), the seed that sets the lines of type, the backdrop colour and whether the camera sways.

Reuse it in your own idea

  • Publishing title: Oak, black ink.
  • Warm heritage: Walnut, red ink.
  • Soft: Pine, blue ink.

Which part is reusable

src/printing-press.js is the ingredient your AI reuses. demo.js is only the example scene around it, and uses chrome-material only for the demo.

Good to know

  • The type is abstract blocks, not readable letters.
  • The piles do not grow or shrink; the new sheet blends into the pile.

Technical details

Technical details
Implementation
Three.js 0.185.1 (WebGL) · ES module src/printing-press.js
Exports
  • createPrintingPress({ wood?, ink?, seed? }) => { group, setProgress(progress), dispose() }
  • INKS: { black, red, blue, sepia }
Dependencies (exact)
  • three@0.185.1 (source) — Renderer, geometry and shader materials.
  • chrome-material@1.1.0 (demo) — Studio environment light, backdrop and contact shadow.
  • apw-runtime@1.0.0 (demo) — Demo harness.
How it fits a scene

Coordinates: The bed (5.4 × 3.8) is at the centre at y = 1; the platen travels between y = 3.4 and 1.9; the blank pile is at x = −6.1 and the printed pile at x = +6.1.

Lighting: A warm key light with a shadow map, a shadow-catching floor and the studio environment.

Timing: setProgress(progress) places the roller, sheet and platen; frames render in any order.

Output
1080×1080, 30 fps, 12 s · procedural (computed from the frame number) · seamless loop — The roller inks, the sheet moves in, is pressed and moves out in fixed windows of the loop; the piles on both sides look the same at the first and last frames, and the camera sway is a sine of the loop, so the last frame meets the first.
Tested
Rendered 360 frames on 2026-10-06 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. Loop: Frame 0 vs end state (progress 1): mean |Δ| 0.0000, max |Δ| 0 of 255.
Performance
A few dozen meshes plus an instanced forme of 154 type blocks and a shadow map: about a millisecond a frame on an integrated Intel GPU. Software WebGL renders in about a second a frame.
Export a video yourself
Download the source, then in the folder: npm install npm run render -- printing-press/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 · sha256:7b2be734b321e1c1… · other versions: 1.0.1
Files
License
MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 AI Pixel Wizard. Released under the MIT License. See LICENSE in this folder. License details
Provenance
Adapted from the owner's threejs-sketches/objects-scenes/printing-press (MIT) and rebuilt for AI Pixel Wizard in October 2026 as an original studio object: a timber-frame hand press with a forme of instanced type, an inking roller, a screw platen and a sheet that is fed, printed and delivered in fixed windows on an exact loop.
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