Rill

Overview

Rill is made for a studio that designs and builds custom water features engineered as a single piece with the glass that carries them — fountains, reflecting pools, and water walls for lobbies, plazas, and private commissions. The brief called for refined glass with an inner glow and a flowing-water background; instead of building those as two separate decorations, Rill merges them into one real technical system.

A fixed, full-viewport WebGL2 canvas runs a genuine explicit finite-difference solve of the 2D shallow-water wave equation on every page, forced by pointer movement and clicks. Its height field is read twice each frame: once by a GPU fragment shader that paints the visible water surface with fresnel, specular highlight, and foam shading, and once by a parallel CPU-side pass that samples the same height array beneath every glass-panelled element on the page to set its inner-glow intensity in real time. The glass panels’ blur and colour shift come from genuine backdrop-filter refraction of the actual animated canvas behind them — not a static decorative blur — so a ripple passing under a card visibly brightens its border at the same moment it disturbs the water you can see through it. A secondary Installations portfolio and Materials library cross-link by glass-system name, each installation’s spec sheet naming the exact proprietary panel that shapes its water. Set in Newsreader and Space Grotesk over a teal-and-foam palette with a warm bronze accent. The simulation degrades to a settled static frame under reduced-motion or without WebGL2, with content fully present either way.