Kage: A Five-Chapter Night Walk Through a Kyoto Temple in Three.js

Kage is a single web page that walks you up a mountain temple at night. Meng To published it on 8 August 2026 as an independent design study, and it has already collected more than twelve hundred stars on GitHub. Everything renders live in the browser with Three.js. A temple, a torii gate, stone stairs, lanterns, a large vermilion moon, fog, rain, and drifting leaves are all built from code as you scroll.

There is no build step and no framework. The entire experience lives in one index.html file, with a vendored copy of Three.js r149 doing the WebGL work. Scroll drives a single continuous camera path, so each chapter feels like a new composed shot rather than a hard cut. Five sections move you through the hero, the temple threshold, still gardens, the craft chapters, and an afterlight closing.

The palette stays near-black with blue-charcoal shadows, warm amber lantern light, bone white, and vermilion. Bloom, film grain, vignette, and depth haze sit on top, and the light splits between warm shoji glow and cold moonlight. Layered over the live scene are cinematic still plates and cutouts of grass, maple branches, sakura, stones, and pine, which fade and blur away as each section hands off to the next.

The still plates and foreground artwork were generated with GPT Image 2, then art-directed into the live scene. Everything that moves, the temple geometry, the lanterns, the moon, the rain and the leaves, is built at runtime in Three.js. So the live world is a hand-coded 3D scene, and only the stills came from a generator.

The result reads like an editorial art book moving through a live world, which is exactly what the build brief asked for. It works on a phone, respects reduced-motion settings, and ships no analytics or trackers. Walk through it at mengto.github.io/kage, and read the source at github.com/MengTo/kage.

■ Filed from The Foundry: the Fern, Fire wing of the city.