The Alchemist is a virtual picture book that brings new life and mystery to the classic novel by Paulo Coelho.
this is an interactive 3D scene using my models from the project, explore away!
The Alchemist is a profound and deeply touching novel set in the old world. It follows a shepherd named Santiago on his journey to discover the transformative power of following his heart and dreams.
Using Javascript and a package called Three.js, I created 3-dimensional scenes and animations to illustrate a particular excerpt of dialogue about the nature of love.
This revamping of The Alchemist utilizes the juxtaposition of the old world and new, the antiquated versus the contemporary.
Blender was the starting point for my scene.
In terms of 3D software, I was far more familiar with both C4D and Maya for modeling, animation, and rendering. As it turns out, though, neither of my preferred programs would be sufficient because they didn't have any accessible plugins to import and export from the .gltf and .glb file types, which are the typical web-friendly formats.
Santiago himself! This is my modified version of “wind” by
with animations from mixamo
My first pass at interactivity in the scene was to make the animations scroll-driven. The idea being that any given line of my excerpt would have a matching timestamp in the animation. This was much more like scrubbing through a movie than it was a picture-book, like later iterations.
Most things weren't a walk in the park, particularly this bird. This was a problem bird.
The twinkling stars were an ever-growing motif in my various touchpoints along the development, most notably in the splash screen and the ground-sky of the final demo.
The final iteration, after hundreds of hours of development, came out to be 2500 lines of code. If you're reading through this while procrastinating something important, you might be interested in watching a 4 minute video of me scrolling through it!
FINAL PROTOTYPE
