I always try to picture it first. Close your eyes: you're walking down a dark corridor. A floorboard creaks right behind you. A draft whistles all around you. Which one makes you turn around, and which one just sends a chill down your spine?

Both, on purpose. They’re two different tools. When I want you to turn around, the sound is pinned to one exact spot: a single footstep right behind you, binaural, staying put as you move your head. You know exactly where it is, and that’s the problem. When I just want your skin to crawl, the house itself whispers "go forward… don’t look back" in overlapping voices that drift around your head and follow you. You can never quite place them.

Hey folks! What do you use for sound design in your demos, games or apps? My current setup is Pixabay for royalty-free SFX and music, ElevenLabs for voice design and text-to-speech, and Audacity for editing, layering sounds and adding effects. Any favorite libraries or plugins you’d recommend?

Detailed sound design is really hard… My mini game already have 70+ sound events, 60+ voice lines, plus breaths and screams. Every creak and footstep needs the right timing, distance and volume. Even with huge CC0 libraries, voice recording, processing plugins and AI tools, I still lose whole weekends digging through samples for those few hidden gems. All that work just to make you hesitate before turning around. And I love it. #gamedev #indiegames #threejs

Looks really nice and detailed! Awesome!

How did the previous version perform? Do you have Lighthouse results from before the rewrite? Would be interesting to compare them under the same test conditions.

And who did that? 😂

One, two, three, four, five, Once I caught a friend alive. Six, seven, eight, then Hell — Now they're lying where they fell. Second player, come and play! Spot's been open since today. Mind your step, excuse the mess: That's the last one, more or less. #threejs #IndieGameDev

Oh no 😞

Good eye. The first version did exactly that: the softness came from picking a blurrier mip of the height map. But a mip blurs by a fixed number of pixels, and mixing levels left steps around the hand and a hard cliff at the wrist. Now the film behaves like a rubber sheet stretched over her. Where her hands or face touch it, it lies on them; everywhere else it pulls back toward flat glass, and a bulge fades out over about 3 cm (that 3 cm is a real distance, not a pixel count), so the film looks the same at any map resolution. The mip pyramid is still there, but only to solve the sheet fast on the GPU.

Wow, looks amazing!

How it's made: a real animated mesh stands behind the glass (from the side, from behind). An orthographic camera renders it into a height map (right), and the mirror's film bends to it, going soft through the mip levels like cloth. The map is redrawn only when she moves. Built with @threejs #WebGPU + TSL.

It's not glass. Something on the other side found out. It's touching back. Would you touch it? #threejs #threejsJourney #gamedev #indiedev

That's really nice! So realistic. I love the way the lights play off each other! Coool! No.. So Hooot!

3/ The depth offset that keeps the collar and brooch apart moved from pixels to vertices, and triangles go front to back, so hidden pixels are skipped. No invisible shadows, one shader for all portraits, the frame goes to the screen once, not after every pass. #threejs #WebGPU

2/ Live: dont-look-back.artcreativeco… What they're wearing and their hair never change, so each portrait has one main texture plus a small atlas for its dead, zombie or demon faces, all in KTX2, compressed right on the GPU. Everything that never moves is baked into the model.

1/ A new challenge inside the #threejsJourney Halloween challenge: the living 3D portrait had to get much lighter, because many more will be watching. Same look, but now a whole hallway of them takes less memory than one used to. Live link and how it's done in @threejs ↓

A frame atlas can't give smooth motion or real volume, and the 3D model doesn't have the texture of an oil painting yet. Which one do you like better? Atlas: dont-look-back.artcreativeco… 3D: dont-look-back.artcreativeco… In 3D, try Follow visitor: she moves only while he isn't looking.

Productive weekend on my #threejsjourney challenge entry, with plenty to share. With @threejs I built a simplified copy of my hallway to test creepy portraits: a head-turn atlas cut from video, and a rigged 3D bust pushing out of the canvas (#TSL + #WebGPU). Live demos 👇

📺 new #threejs (Opus?) stream today, two parallel projects: a) using SDFs for particles collisions, soft shadows, baking AO/ thickness Blender. Tech prompts. b) naive prompt to make a nice scene of similar direction. You judge where we are now piped.video/live/0_1WDKZKXRQ