Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to M. C. Escher spiral in WebGL inspired by 3Blue1Brown
The latest 3Blue1Brown video [1] about the M. C. Escher print gallery effect inspired me to re-implement the effect as WebGL fragment shader on my own. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxFjLJ3rVY
This WebGL implementation recreates the M. C. Escher print gallery effect as a fragment shader, inspired by a 3Blue1Brown video explaining the mathematical concept. The tool is designed for anyone interested in… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com · its alternatives →
- 2
There are lots of glassmorphism generators out there, but I wanted to push the effect further! This project is the result of months of experimenting with CSS property layering and battling browser quirks. Cross-browser compatibility is actually the reason I rely on ::before and ::after pseudo-elements to build up the effect. Move the color/opacity to the main element, and you’ll get weird color bleed on the corners in Chrome. Move the texture, and it muddles the bevel’s specular highlight. Move the bevel, and it gets blurred out by the backdrop-filter. And so on! Layers include: *…
2025 · glass3d.dev · its alternatives →
- 3
A experimental audio visualizer built with WebGL (React Three Fiber and Three.js)
2023 · pouria.dev · its alternatives →
- 4TCtextshader.com▲260
TLDR: Click the link to see some cool visualizations, refresh a few times for random examples, and try editing some of the code yourself. This is a small weekend project of mine inspired by shadertoy.com It's a static single-page site hosted on GitHub pages so the website design is pretty barebones. I'm not a web developer so I mainly wanted to create a Cool Thing with my free time and not have to learn tons of front-end to do it. I'd love to hear what people think about it and please post or send me any shaders you make! You can use the link button in the bottom right to share. I hope that…
2022 · textshader.com · its alternatives →
- 5RT
2023 · antimatter15.com · its alternatives →
- 6
This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Build 3D interactions visually, without writing any code
2015 · 3d-transforms.webflow.com · its alternatives →
- 8FT
2021 · static.laszlokorte.de · its alternatives →
- 9
Two clip-paths, over the navigation: - The first clip-path is a circle (top-left corner) - The second clip-path is a polygon, that acts like a ray (hardcoded, can be improved) The original work by Iventions Events https://iventions.com/ uses JavaScript, but I found CSS-only approach more fun Here's a demo and the codebase: https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10QA
Hi! This is my little project introducing quasicrystals animations with some parameters. It uses a custom shader to allow higher resolution. Not all combinations look equally good. For example the "Spectrum" color palette IMO makes sense only for low values of "Tempo" and "Pattern Density". If you have VR googles, I recommend trying the WebXR version - it's really nice.
Aug 2026 · hypnagogic-quasicrystals.github.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Browse and share GPU-made GIFs. Explore GLSL shader experiments, search by topic, and open any piece in the editor to learn or remix.
2018 · shadergif.com · its alternatives →
- 12
I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.
2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →
- 13
How can you make affine transformations (the only ones SVGs are capable of) resemble perspective transformations?
2025 · seve.blog · its alternatives →
- 14
Over the weekend I was discussing the latest news relating to open weights with some of my non-techie friends. After 30 mins of waffling, I realised it is quite a long and interesting story, with many twists and turns. I've always wanted to create a 'long scroll' story, but have never found a suitable story to tell. This felt like a fun weekend project to undertake. The story itself doesn't have too many scroll effects (which is probably a good thing), it was more about trying to tell a story with a certain style that wouldn't really fit on my personal blog. Would love to get your feedback…
2020 · blog.scottlogic.com · its alternatives →
- 15
This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
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A minimalist three-dimensional coding environment. Control 8x8x8 dots with a single JavaScript function.
2021 · doersino.github.io · its alternatives →
- 18
Voxel-engine in Javascript. Contribute to Lallassu/voxelengine3 development by creating an account on GitHub.
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19IM
I was fascinated by this [0] and this video [1]. After many struggles, I finally built this app that traces images using circles similar to what these videos had shown. The most challenging part (to me) is to find a way to convert images to vector lines. I had tried Potrace, but its output is not suitable for my use case: too many small elements share the same border. Potrace's goal is to represent the original image faithfully using vector lines. But I want to trace the image edges. After searching and trying some Potrace alternatives in vain, I finally found my keyword. Surprisingly (to…
2022 · phqb.github.io · its alternatives →
- 20EI
2024 · medium.com · its alternatives →
- 21
I ported Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 (4B parameter image-to-3D model) to run on Apple Silicon via PyTorch MPS. The original requires CUDA with flash_attn, nvdiffrast, and custom sparse convolution kernels: none of which work on Mac. I replaced the CUDA-specific ops with pure-PyTorch alternatives: a gather-scatter sparse 3D convolution, SDPA attention for sparse transformers, and a Python-based mesh extraction replacing CUDA hashmap operations. Total changes are a few hundred lines across 9 files. Generates ~400K vertex meshes from single photos in about 3.5 minutes on M4 Pro (24GB). Not as fast as…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hey HN! We're Ben and Izak, founders of Repaint (YC S23). Repaint is like Figma, but for creating real websites. It has panning, zooming, and dragging elements around. The settings closely follow html/css. We think an open canvas is a big improvement over other website builders. Everything is easier: styling, consistency, responsiveness… But making it work was hard! We thought HN would appreciate the tech behind it: - A custom WebGL rendering engine (w/text, shadows, blurs, gradients, & opacity groups) - A partial implementation of the css spec - A custom text editor & text shaper…
2024 · repaint.com · its alternatives →
- 23ST
2015 · mattdesl.github.io · its alternatives →
- 24
Renders black hole gravitational lensing effects in an image canvas using WebGL, glfx.js, and numeric.js - cliffcrosland/black-hole.js
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
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