Interactive squishy jelly whale

Build a single-file interactive WebGPU soft-body study called "Whale Jelly" (Material Studies / No. 043), matching the quality of an earlier watermelon-slice jelly study. Subject: a humpback whale cast in two layers of gummy jelly, lying on its belly on a studio table.

Geometry: a signed-distance whale — an elliptical section swept along a curved spine (broad head with a flat crown, deep chest, narrow keeled tail stock), the belly pressed flat on the floor, smoothly joined to notched flukes with a scalloped trailing edge, long flippers with knobs along the leading edge, a small dorsal fin and twin blowhole dimples. Mesh it with surface nets and Newton projection; simulate it with a snapped hex lattice (5 tets per cell, a node layer on the floor) and XPBD (60 Hz, 10 substeps, co-rotational shape matching, volume constraints, edge damping, floor friction). Make the fins firmest and the clear body jelly softest.

Look: clear tinted jelly over a milky layer. The milky layer is its own embedded surface, cut by a wavy line along the flank that rises at the head into the mouth. Light it with key light absorbed through the jelly above it, measured from shadow-map depth. Draw throat pleats, a dark mouth groove, head tubercles and tail-stock knuckles in the shader from rest-space coordinates as bump-mapped relief. Add glossy dark bead eyes and a few trapped air bubbles. Render with refraction plus Beer–Lambert thickness from back-face depth, back-lit glow on the thin fins, a jelly-tinted floor shadow, PCSS soft shadows, contact AO, studio softbox reflections and GGX highlights, then PBR Neutral tone mapping.

Interaction: grab and stretch anywhere, with twist on scroll or a second finger. A "Blow a spout" button fires a column of rigid jelly drops from the blowhole along its deformed axis; the drops bounce, roll, land on the whale through its tets, and can be picked up and thrown.

UI (English, editorial style): masthead, live status pill, specimen panel (three colourways — Ocean, Slate, Lagoon; Firmness and Internal damping sliders; Blow / Reset; ¼ speed; Show mesh; Pause), live readouts (mass, volume %, length in cm snout-to-notch, loose drops), "Inside the experiment" notes, a WebGPU fallback and a stacked mobile layout.

Source: the creator's reply under the post. Kept in its original language, unedited.

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