Verve GL Studio

What you can build with verve.gl. One declarative ctx.glScene - a GPU-instanced floor-slab-and-pillars field, PBR/IBL lit under three simultaneous shadow casters (a key spot, a raking directional, and an overhead LTC area light), sliced open by a live world-space cross-section. Drag to orbit, wheel to zoom, click a part to inspect it.

Live in this hero: multi-light PBR + image-based lighting, three shadow casters (spot + directional + area), a world-space clip cutaway, click-to-inspect picking, and auto-rotate (freeze it). Rendered on WebGPU when available, WebGL2 otherwise.

Click a part to fire verve:studio-pick (a bubbling DOM CustomEvent carrying the picked mesh name). Post-processing (tonemap, SSAO, SSR, DoF, OIT) and custom materials run on their own dedicated demos below - see the tour.

Full capability tour

The hero above is one live GlScene. Every other verve.gl feature has its own working demo - grouped below.

Geometry & primitives

Points & spritesBillboard point cloud + textured disc sprite.Fat linesInstanced screen-space quad line segments.DecalsProjected DecalGeometry on a lit PBR sphere.Wireframe modeTriangle edges via the standalone wire shader.Distance LOD3 LOD levels in one mesh, picked by distance.Morph targetsThree blend shapes driven by a baked clip.16 morph targetsA rolling wave from 16 phased blend shapes.

Lighting & shadows

Shadow mapDirectional depth map with 3x3 PCF.Spot + shadowSpot caster, fill directional, point accent.Point-light shadowOmnidirectional 6-face distance atlas.Area light (LTC)Rect area light + soft shadow (Heitz 2016).Multi-light shadowsDirectional + spot + point casting at once.Cascaded shadow mapsOne directional caster split into 4 cascades.Distance fogLinear fog applied after PBR, before tonemap.

Camera & clipping

Orthographic projectionPerspective vs ortho on one cube grid.Orthographic CSMCascades fit slabs, not frustum wedges.Clip planesWorld-space half-space cutaway (like the hero).

Materials & textures

Reflection probeRuntime cubemap capture bound as specular IBL.Custom shader materialsComptime-baked frag hooks + live tint uniform.Compressed texturesKTX2 BC7->S3TC->PNG capability delivery.Alpha-test cutoutMASK holes + scroll-driven dissolve.Mixed materialsPer-submesh shader variants, one draw stream.Double-sidedBack-face normals flipped so both sides light.

Instancing

GPU instancingInstanced fields: per-instance cull + shadows, one draw call per slice.

Post-processing (image quality)

Tone-mapping6 operators (Linear->AgX->Uncharted2) + vignette.SSAODepth+normal G-buffer ambient occlusion.SSR32-step screen-space reflection ray-march.Depth of fieldCircle-of-confusion blur from G-buffer depth.Order-independent transparencyWeighted-blended OIT, no depth sort.

Scenes & product

Declarative 3D sceneThe ctx.glScene builder end to end.Product viewerScroll-scrub turntable + plain orbit companion.Skinned + morphRigged bar that also morphs (glTF order).Two scenes, one pageIndependent GlScene islands, per-instance state.

Beyond GL

Multi-instance graphsInteractive SVG + canvas2d force graphs.Animation engineFull scroll-scrubbed declarative anim landing.

Full write-up: the GL Studio guide.