Forged

explore.auravinyl.com #webgpu #raytracing #rtx

I'll be sharing my story at @digitdesigndays Friday at 4pm

I’ve been in the middle of building out a new space lately and it’s kind of turning into something I’ve wanted for a long time. Downstairs is becoming a full workshop for cars. Aura Vinyl, wraps, installs, the physical side of things. Upstairs is Forged. AI, real-time graphics, interactive work. Same brain, two completely different outputs. This mixed reality experiment came out of that. I had an empty warehouse and a pair of Snapchat Spectacles, so I decided to build something quick. I dropped in a Porsche model, hooked up an Xbox controller, and turned it into a driftable AR car. The part I cared about most was making it feel grounded, not like a floating asset. I took a photo of the warehouse, ran it through World Labs to generate a panorama, and used that for lighting and reflections so the car actually sits in the environment.

I made an AI model to help with a problem I’ve run into a lot with microsites. Microsites got expensive because expectations went through the roof. To hit that level of detail, you often needed a ton of 3D artist time just to build out a visual world. Compared to something like an AR experience, the budget gap could easily be a factor of 10. Now instead of spending days or weeks creating detail, I can generate it in minutes. Visually rich microsites take far less time to build, which means projects that normally wouldn’t get greenlit suddenly can and/or the budget can go toward the more meaningful creative moments. Full microsites can now cost as much as a bite-sized AR experience. #webgl #webgpu

I implemented real-time screen space raytracing using compute shaders in WebGPU, and I took a moment to create a print for my wall. This is a heavy effect to compute, but it's going to be fantastic on installations with a beefy GPU. It's a simple on switch that elevates the visual quality to something like an Octane render. #WebGPU #webgl

Happy holidays from Forged: xmas.forged.build

The timeline for making things is collapsing. I wanted to see how much I could generate without writing feature code. This took ~2 hours. What used to take 2 days now fits into an afternoon. K-pop Demon Hunters slash-em-up for my daughter’s birthday. Foundry for assets, agent layer for prompts, World Labs for 3D splats + GI. Movement, logic, particles, reflections all prompted on top of custom Cursor dev. Still prototype quality, but if this is 2 hours, imagine a full timeline.

Fresh out of the lab: Continuum, our system for generative, responsive storytelling. Built with Foundry, it connects AI and code to create living experiences that react to you in real time. First prototype: Hot Wheels City

4.5 million particles form a flowing digital Statue of Liberty-inspired sculpture that evolves live as attendees contribute via phone. We built the experience for Hall of Flowers, converting a static mesh into volumetric particle data in Houdini, ray-tracing every particle so it behaves like a unified surface.  Using an AR camera-capture tool, we pre-visualised the statue in the venue space, locked in cinematic framing with real-world motion, then live-synced every guest’s digital flower to massive LED walls across multiple halls. Dive into the full build story and technical breakdown → casestudies.forged.build/hal… #webgl #webgpu #creativecoding

Compute shaders have accelerated the "fake tracing" pipeline: PBR, SSDO, Soft Shadows, Voxel Cone Tracing. Prior to the Aura Color Explorer, vinyl wrap shops would have to buy a $200 Unreal app which required a gaming PC, and customers to physically be present to see it. But the Color Explorer allows users to get this for free in an instant, and now with WebGPU the visual quality is in the same ballpark as Unreal, but on a website that has to load in seconds and run on a mobile phone. Case Study: casestudies.forged.build/aur…

GLSL ES1 is the best shader language for creative coding. If that's way too boring, @codrops has graciously published a case study on how the rest of the Forged site came to life with higher level goodies like lighting and art direction: tympanus.net/codrops/2025/10…

After 13 years at Active Theory, I started from zero. No portfolio, no team, no codebase; just experience and a clear idea of what I wanted to build next. forged.build

Been awhile! Had an hour to play with a new type of fluid + particle interaction #webgl

M1 Max is such a massive leap in performance. This laptop is more powerful than a Ryzen 9/3070TI PC I had been using. It's still a small audience but more people will now get access to the very high end of our 3D experiences. Previously, it was just gaming PCs

We're looking for more WebGL developers (mid + senior) to join our team at Active Theory / Dreamwave. Full job description: activetheory.notion.site/Sen… but feel free to connect with me personally on Twitter