Molten Mirror
A four-number room sampled through a bent view direction, so every highlight is a reflection rather than a painted one.
The scene in this preview is the file shown here. The surrounding demo shell only provides context and is not part of the copied code.
"use client";
import * as React from "react";
import * as THREE from "three";
/**
* Molten Mirror — metal is what it reflects.
*About this effect
A backdrop for a surface that should feel like it is worth something — a balance, a card, a premium tier. A polished material has almost no colour of its own, and what tells you something is chrome rather than grey plastic is that it shows you the room, bent: a bright band where the ceiling is, a dark one where the floor is, and a hard edge between them that stretches and pinches as the surface curves. Grey with a soft highlight painted on top reads as plastic every time, and adding gloss never fixes it, because what is missing is not shininess but the fact that there is nothing to see in it. So this file builds a room before it builds a surface — a floor, a ceiling, a horizon and one strip light, four numbers in total — and then perturbs the view direction by the slope of a height field and samples the room through it. That is not much of a room and it does not need to be: what a mirror needs from its surroundings is one strong light-to-dark edge, because that edge is the only thing in a reflection whose distortion the eye can read. Every stretched highlight and every pinch where two ripples meet is that edge being bent. The environment is arithmetic rather than a cube map for the reason everything in this section is: an entry that needs an HDRI to run is not a file anyone can paste.
Related effects
- Plasma BloomThree fields multiplied rather than added, so light appears only where all three agree and most of the frame stays dark.
- Silk SheenBrightness taken from thread direction rather than position, so the highlight moves because the cloth turned.
- Thin Film WashColour computed from film thickness at three wavelengths, so the sequence is interference and not a hue ramp.