I built a Three.js rendering study inspired by Tiny Glade’s painterly aesthetic, and got it running at 120fps in the browser. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying how stylized games achieve that soft, handcrafted look in real time. Tiny Glade was a huge inspiration, and I wanted... to use the browser as a constraint: no compute shaders, no native GPU access, and single-threaded JavaScript. As part of this study, I implemented: - GPU-driven instanced brick walls with procedural noise jitter and elastic build animations - Tree, bush, and flower rendering with billboard card expansion, wind sway, and grow animations - Procedural grass with terrain conformance and interactive push deformation - Animated water with layered noise, interactive ripples, and Fresnel-based reflections - Procedural terrain with slope-aware triplanar materials, dirt paths, and rocks - A 7-pass post-processing stack with TAA, bloom, depth of field, painterly filtering, ACES tonemapping, 3D LUT color grading, and film grain The hardest part wasn’t writing any single shader. It was making all of these systems work together at high frame rates inside WebGL, where every millisecond counts and performance problems compound quickly across animation, materials, post-processing, and scene management. Some techniques in this study were inspired by analyzing Tiny Glade’s rendering approach, while others were original implementations built from scratch from visual reference. That contrast taught me a lot: recreating an effect is one challenge, but designing your own shaders and systems to achieve a similar feel is a very different one. This is a private educational rendering study. Some temporary placeholder content is being used during the research phase, and any public or production version would use original or properly licensed assets. Huge credit to Pounce Light for the incredible art direction and rendering work in Tiny Glade: Three.js #gamedev #webgl #threejs #rendering #graphics #realtimerendering #shaderdevshow more

Ibrahim Boona

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