LIGHTHOUSE · under the water

Deep-sea Lighthouse

A lighthouse that sank and kept working. Its beam sweeps once every sixteen seconds, kelp sways with the current, marine snow drifts up through the cone of light, a school of fish circles the tower, jellyfish pulse past, and a net of caustics keeps moving across the sea floor. The seabed, the taper of the tower, the bend of every frond and the falloff of the beam are all computed at runtime — no models, no textures.

External assets
0
Triangles
≈ 62k
Kelp
14
Preset views
3

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The tower stands on something

The seabed is pseudo-noise from summed sines, but it is flattened to zero within seven units of the tower. Otherwise the tower half-floats on a dune and the illusion dies at a glance.

The light follows the ground

The caustics on the sea floor are not a flat plane: they reuse the seabed’s own displaced geometry, lifted three centimetres, so the light runs along the slopes instead of cutting through them. The beam is softened by a mask that fades along its length.

It can stop

With reduced motion preferred, the beam, the kelp and the snow all stop; what remains is still a lighthouse you can drag and zoom.