The Unorthodox Angle
Not by writing a spec and waiting — by moving, seeing what we had, and sharpening the vision one round at a time.
What started as 'can we add a cool galaxy animation' turned into something we think is genuinely unlike anything else on the web. Here's how it actually got built.
The Brief
We wanted a gateway element for the Creatorverse homepage. Something visitors could click to enter. Simple enough in concept — but we didn't want a stock video loop. We wanted it to feel alive.
We built it with Claude — Anthropic's AI — in a live, iterative session. Not by writing a spec and waiting. By moving, seeing what we had, and sharpening the vision one round at a time.
Version 1: Particle Galaxy
The first build was a particle system — 2,200 individual points distributed across five spiral arms, orbiting in 3D with continuous hue cycling. Unmistakably galactic. Dense, colorful, swirling.
It looked great. But the brief sharpened: not just galactic — spherical. Not particles — blobs. More organic. More lava lamp than star field. That single pivot changed everything about the technical approach.
Version 2: Metaballs
Lava lamps work on a specific visual principle: distinct blobs that approach each other, deform, and drift apart without ever fully mixing. To replicate this digitally, we moved to metaballs — each blob generating a scalar field, with the final image determined by whichever field dominates at each pixel.
The key was winner-takes-all rendering. Each pixel goes entirely to the strongest blob. Colors stay pure and distinct. Everything lives inside a sphere with 3D lighting: specular highlight, diffuse shading, edge fade. The glass-orb illusion.
Version 3: True 3D Orbits
The lava lamp moved in 2D. The next push put the blobs on real 3D orbital paths — each on an independently tilted ellipse, some clockwise, some counter-clockwise, at different inclinations. Blobs behind the center darken; blobs in front brighten. The whole system rotates slowly on a global axis. Twelve blobs crossing all three axes — flowing past, in front of, and behind each other in genuine 3D space.
Version 4: Irregular Shapes and 22 Colors
Real lava lamp blobs aren't round. They have tendrils, bulges, concave dents. They look alive because their geometry is irregular and changing.
We rebuilt each blob as a cluster of 3-6 sub-lobes — smaller field emitters offset from the center, each drifting on its own independent sine wave. Shapes that continuously deform: stretching into an arm here, pulling into a concavity there. The palette expanded to 22 simultaneous blobs: hot pink, deep violet, teal, orange, emerald, gold, crimson, sky blue, magenta, cyan, acid green, and more.
Version 5: The Cosmic Layer
The original galaxy concept never disappeared — it became the environment the blobs inhabit. The void between blobs became a living nebula: a deep-indigo/purple field shifting slowly over time, generated by layered sine functions. 280 stars seeded throughout the interior, rotating with the system, twinkling independently. Each blob leaves a fading halo trail behind it as it moves — like a comet cutting through gas.
The Performance Fix: Pre-rendering
All that pixel-by-pixel computation — metaball fields, 3D projections, lighting calculations, star checks — is expensive. Running it live every frame produces inconsistent speed across devices.
The fix: pre-render all 240 frames once on page load, store them as pixel buffers in memory, then play them back in a loop. Playback becomes a single putImageData call per frame — the cheapest possible draw operation. Consistent speed on any device.
What It Is
A self-contained HTML canvas animation. 22 color blobs on independent 3D orbital paths. Irregular, amoeba-like shapes built from 3-6 sub-lobes in constant deformation. A living nebula background. 280 twinkling stars. Full 3D lighting with a glassy highlight overlay. Pre-rendered for silky consistent playback. Clickable — taking you directly into the Creatorverse.
The Takeaway
This is how the Creatorverse gets built: not by specifying the final answer upfront, but by moving toward something and refining it until it's right. The orb is a piece of generative art. It was built in a conversation.
Click the orb. See where it takes you.