Little Blue — a real-time coral reef, rendered from equations

A tropical reef flat, drawn live in your browser through the porthole of a submersible. Nothing here is a photograph or a painting: the water, the light, the seabed and the animals are all computed from physical models, every frame.

• A shallow-water solver drives the surface, and the caustics on the sand are the Jacobian of its refraction map — the real cause of those moving nets of light, not a looping texture.
• Two-rate Jaffe–McGlamery optics take the red out of the light with distance, which is what makes the far reef go blue.
• The sand is procedural carbonate: five grain populations of coral, shell, foraminifera, calcareous algae and lithic fragments, over wave ripples in the anorbital regime.
• About 3,200 coral colonies from six archetypes, seated by ray-casting the rock they grow on, with cavity occlusion baked from a voxel trace.
• Six fish species with traced body profiles, schooling on one shared boids implementation, each casting its own shadow on the bed.

An awakewithai.com production.