Vårkänslor is Swedish and translates to “spring feelings”. This is a happy and hopeful feeling for a people that has been living in cold and darkness for months on end. The goal of this project was to embody the feeling of the Swedish spring, taking inspiration from old biology books and watercolor art.

I created a procedural watercolor shader in Blender that I rendered out as black and white textures for the spheres and flowers that was later used inside my portals. This is a workaround since you cannot bake these types of textures using Cycles because of certain nodes used. After some tweaking in Photoshop, I had three seamless watercolor textures suitable for my portals.

I used blender to model everything, draco compression to optimize the file size and the gltfjsx pipeline to process the geometry in my code. I've kept the textures and geometry modest without sacrificing too much visual quality.

One challenge I had was surprisingly enough rendering the HTML elements within the portals. The main issue for this was that the HTML was being rendered behind the sphere in the portal and hence was not shown.

My solution for this was by modifying the drei HTML component which normally moves in 3d-space by putting the HTML in a group and attaching it to the camera.  This means I can continually update its position to keep it in a fixed place in the scene.


Project live [ here ]
Github [ here ]​​​​​​​