The scenes on this site are built from openly licensed work by other people. Their terms ask for attribution, and this is it.
Downloaded from Sketchfab under CC BY 4.0 and stripped of their textures and detail meshes, since the site replaces every material with its own shading.
Rocks, trees, grass and kelp from the public-domain Kenney nature kit, with further CC0 work by Quaternius and hat_my_guy.
Under CC BY 3.0 via Poly Pizza: boulder, dead tree, grass and kelp by Poly by Google, boulder by jeremy, and desert boulder by Leigh.
None of these models arrive looking like this. Everything you see is drawn by a shader we wrote, in three passes over the same geometry: shaded facets, the wireframe over them, and a dot at every vertex. Every material that came with a model is discarded before it renders, which is also why we strip the textures out of the files. A 2.5MB tree was carrying 2.3MB of images that never reached the screen.
The meshes are too dense for this. A wireframe over 24,000 triangles reads as noise, and the eye wants roughly the same facet size across a scene, so a detailed shark next to a simple fox looks wrong rather than detailed. Everything is decimated to about the same budget, near 900 triangles.
That is the interesting part. Standard edge-collapse simplification throws away the skin weights, so a decimated animal cannot be animated. We simplify a bare position-only copy of the mesh, then spatially bucket the original vertices and carry each original's bone indices and weights across to the nearest surviving vertex. The result is a 900-triangle leopard that still walks on the original skeleton.
Then the small corrections. The leopard's claws were folded back into its toe pads, because at this triangle count they read as spikes. The Cape fox is the Khronos sample fox with its ears grown in bind space, since Vulpes chama is mostly ears.
They are not invented terrain. Each one is baked from 30-metre AWS Terrain Tiles into a 320 by 320 height grid, quantised to 16 bits, which at 50 metres per sample is accurate to about a centimetre. The cedar and leopard chapters stand in the Driehoek valley. The eagle circles the Wolfberg, on a grid re-centred on the steepest face we could find in it so the cliff line gets the fine detail.
What sits on the terrain is generated against it: sandstone bedding along the contours, cliff bands on the steep sections, boulders and cedars and grass scattered by rules rather than placed by hand. The props above are the vocabulary; the arrangement is ours.
Everything Ceder builds is released under the Apache License 2.0.