Try it live Description
Into the Qingming Scroll is a gift for friends around the world who want to explore Chinese culture, inviting you to discover a historic city through its streets, its customs and the everyday lives of its people. Inspired by Zhang Zeduan's Along the River During the Qingming Festival, this interactive 3D game casts you as A-Qing, a young scholar arriving in Bianjing, the capital of China's Northern Song dynasty. You share his curiosity as an unfamiliar city gradually becomes a place of faces, conversations and stories.
The current experience brings Rainbow Bridge and its riverside market to life. Cross the wooden bridge, browse the stalls, travel by boat, and meet boatmen, peddlers and craftspeople. A tense moment beneath the bridge draws you into a light quest: talk to the locals, gather supplies and help resolve the trouble. Completing the quest unlocks four stories about the people you have met.
Optional character and landmark introductions explain the trades and customs behind the scene, drawing on the historical text Dongjing Meng Hua Lu. Historical references are clearly distinguished from fictional stories, so you can explore without any prior knowledge of Chinese history. The game is built with Three.js; its 3D characters and props were generated with Tripo, development was assisted by Codex, and the character images were made with Doubao. Together they turn a celebrated Chinese painting into a world you can move through and take part in.
The author hopes you leave with more than the memory of a beautiful bridge: perhaps a boatman's worries, a merchant's livelihood or a small kindness between strangers, and a feeling of being a little closer to the people and culture of China.
How Tripo was used
Tripo is the driving force behind this Bianjing: working in Codex, the author called Tripo through its MCP (API-first) to batch-generate all 45 characters and to create the story props.
- Forty-five 3D characters: a script steps through a spreadsheet of figures 1 to 45, reads each one's three-view images and written description, and calls Tripo image-to-3D to generate the character. The spec: realistic Northern Song costume, T-pose, clean quads, 2K albedo textures and 15k to 40k triangles depending on layers of clothing, with recognizable faces and no lookalikes.
- Auto-rigging and animation: full Tripo humanoid rigging is switched on automatically, finger bones included, with smooth weights to reduce clothing clipping. Each character then gets three animations, a 2-second idle loop, a 4-second slow walk and a small action specific to their trade, and is exported as GLB.
- Story props: the props used in the quest beneath Rainbow Bridge were generated with Tripo too.
The author's first demo used scenes and characters made with Codex and Blender, and it looks very different from the version optimized with Tripo. In the author's words, Tripo makes the people more lifelike and the scene closer to reality.
