An exploration of real-time material and lighting changes in a 3D interior — for the moment you realise paint colour and material finish are decisions a browser can show you in advance.
I built this one because I was curious about a question that's normally answered by expensive architectural visualisation software: how does this room look when I change the paint colour and the material finishes? Could a browser do the same job — not at the photorealistic level of V-Ray or Lumion, but well enough to be useful for early design decisions?
It turns out it can. With soft shadow mapping, careful material setup, and a simple colour-adjustment system, you can build an interior space where the user changes furniture material in real time and sees the effect immediately. Click here to access.
What it is
A 3D interior — a "Vivid Jungle" workspace with furniture, lighting, and a window — where you can adjust the materials and colours of the objects with a control panel. Pick a chair colour, switch the table finish, see the result in seconds.
What stayed with me
The technical lesson was material parameter exposure. Materials in a 3D engine have many parameters (colour, roughness, metalness, opacity, emissive). Exposing the right subset to the user — and only that subset — is the difference between a configurator and a chaos engine. The right level of abstraction lets non-technical users explore the design space without getting lost.
The broader lesson was that architectural visualisation has been gated by software cost for too long. The browser can do enough of the job, well enough, for many early-stage design decisions. The polished-photorealistic stage still needs the heavy tools, but the iterate-and-explore stage doesn't.
Part of the early experiments — wondering what other professional workflows might be possible in a browser tab.