Try it live Description
AFTERTIDE is a gift for the ocean's future inhabitants: a city that keeps living after humans leave. This interactive cinematic world runs in a desktop browser. Visitors can explore freely or follow a guided journey with Chinese and English subtitles, pausing to look around and moving on whenever they choose.
Three chapters, Silence, Rewilded and Echoes, reveal the same city through changing light, marine life and returning memories. Jellyfish drift between towers, sardines gather into a living storm, and a whale travels from submerged streets toward the open sea.
A returning visitor brings a small energy core, and a maintenance rover repairs one connection so the city's lights and memories can serve its new residents. From this quiet act of care, the journey moves toward a whale breach and an aurora above the water. AFTERTIDE imagines what we might leave behind, and how a small repair could help a world continue beyond us. The gift is a place where other lives can belong.
Tripo-generated architecture, vehicles and story props were refined in Blender and brought into Three.js alongside the author's own geometry, glass, animation and lighting, with shared currents and procedural sound tying the experience together. The music, "Weightless Glow" 1 and 2, was created by the author with Suno and edited for the film.
Before the event, the author had a rough underwater prototype with a whale, manta rays, jellyfish and shrimp, with only basic rendering and movement. The underwater city with all its buildings, bridges, stations and transport, the new whale, the expanded lighting, marine interactions, narrative, camera choreography and interface, and the final film were all made during the hackathon.
How Tripo was used
Tripo was central to AFTERTIDE's asset pipeline.
- City and vehicles: PBR train carriages, maintenance robots, architectural components, streetlights, bridge decks and marine habitats were generated with Tripo from concept images made with OpenAI image generation.
- The whale: the whale on screen is a new Tripo-generated model, rigged with Tripo, replacing the one in the earlier prototype; it has custom materials and procedural animation.
- Into the scene: Blender prepared the meshes and LODs for Three.js. Wheels and rotors turn, trains move, habitats respond to the current and lighting changes by chapter, combining generated detail with precise procedural structures and real-time simulation.
