Overview
I’ve always wanted to take a pottery class! I’ll get around to it someday, but in the meantime, I made myself a digital studio. Here, you can shape spinning clay with your hands through the webcam (or with a mouse). When finished, you glaze and fire your work for download.
Mechanics
Graphics
The clay is stored as two lists of radii—the outside wall and inside wall—ring by ring from floor to rim. It’s rebuilt into a new 3D shape every time a shaping change is made. Textures are painted in several layers from smooth random noise, with a thin glossy coat simulating the sheen of water. I also used film-style tone mapping to keep shadows and highlights realistic.
Interaction
MediaPipe Hand Landmarker runs in the browser and sorts each hand by pose, processing relevant movement and filtering out everything else. Each press dents a band of rings, strongest in the middle and fading out to a finger’s width. After a touch, each ring briefly blends with its neighbors, which smooths out lumps like wet clay.