Orbs

Orbs is a real time 3D artwork written with shaders. It renders instantaneously, is interactive, and animated.

The interaction and animation is silky smooth since one shader is used to render the entire scene. You can navigate with the camera to explore the scene in detail, see below.

Orbs Origin Story

As the new James Webb Space Telescope started examining exoplanets, several Orbs were discovered orbiting close to planet surfaces. So far, hundreds of images have been returned from exoplanets all around our galaxy containing Orbs.

The Orb is a spherical object that contains a constantly changing structure internally. The Orb seems to be some kind of creative process with an endless energy supply. Perhaps it's creating the attached fractal structure underneath. This is all speculation at this point, we do not fully understand the function of Orbs.

Details

The scene contains an Orb, Fractal, and Surface, all of which are animated. You can use the camera to explore the scene, including the inside of the Orb and Fractal.

The fractal is a variant of a Menger 4D sponge. The angles in the features determine the shape of the fractal. There is very large variation, from almost cubic shapes to very fragmented organic shapes.

The fractal variation, along with the 38 beautiful hand tuned palettes ensure each mint will be entirely unique.

The scene is rendered using one fragment shader and is very fast. Since it uses shaders, a gpu is recommended.

Orbs is written using a customized version of Shader Park, an amazing javascript library for writing WebGL based shaders. Highly recommended, feel free to contact me about using Shader Park in fxhash.

To navigate:

Mouse wheel to zoom in and out.
Left button down and drag to rotate scene.
Right button down and drag to pan scene.

For example, if you want to see the inside of the fractal, first stop the animation with 'r', then pan to get the hole in the fractal centered on the screen. Then zoom into the the center and rotate around with the left mouse button down.

Similarly, you can navigate to the center of the Orb and look around in the same way (you may want to leave the Orb animation on in this case).

Keys are as follows:

'o' Toggle Orb animation.
'r' Toggle Fractal rotation.
's' Save - save a png with the exact size of the window.

Orbs Future

Orbs are integral to an fxhash based generative art metaverse that we are actively working on. Orb owners are entitled to a private space in the metaverse. See @slagrouv on twitter or contact me through the fxhash discord for more information.