Palace of Fine Arts, photoreal Blender build and web walkthrough

A photoreal 3D model of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco (the 1974 concrete reconstruction), built in Blender 5.2 entirely by scripts and lit at golden hour, then turned into a web walkthrough that runs in a browser and on an iPhone. The whole thing was built by a team of AI agents (Claude Code) directed by one person over September 2026; every decision, score and cost is on record in docs/.

• Walk through it: https://pfa-walkthrough.3d-render-blender-3rd-attempt-building.workers.dev (keys 1 to 6 jump to the six viewpoints; W A S D walk; a phone gets its own tier).
• The story of the web week, for non-technical readers: Five Days to a Phone (a single page with sliders and charts; also the project timeline of the Blender build).
• How it was made and what it cost: docs/retrospective.md (the Blender build), docs/retrospective_phase6.md (the web walkthrough), docs/usage/ (token accounting scripts and tables), docs/decisions.md (every decision with its reason), docs/status.md (the handoff log).

Pages

dkhh10.github.io/palace-of-fine-arts-3d serves the docs/ folder, so the HTML pages open as pages rather than as source.

What is here

path	what
CLAUDE.md	the operating rules the agents worked under (conventions, casting, definition of done)
scripts/	every Blender build script (architecture, ornament, materials, environment, lighting), QA cameras, comparison tools, watchdog
export/	the web pipeline: export set, decimation, bakes (lightmaps, PBR, impostors), packing, tiers, manifests
web/	the three.js viewer (Vite), capture tools, tests, deploy script
docs/	mission, reference sheet, decisions log, status handoff, 26 QA rounds, code reviews, briefs, delivery notes, retrospectives
renders/	previews, QA comparison sheets and viewer captures at 960 px (full-size files are in the Release, see below)
reference/	measurements, OpenStreetMap footprints, photo index and crops (all photos from Wikimedia Commons, see ATTRIBUTION.md)
assets/	textures and material sources; the .blend files themselves are in the Release

Big files

Git holds only files under 2 MB. The Blender files (assets/*.blend, master_delivery.blend), the 4K hero renders and the flythrough test are attached to the GitHub Release assets-v1. Drop the .blend files into assets/ and the master into the repo root to rebuild; scripts/build_master.py assembles master.blend from them. The web viewer's baked assets (about 600 MB) are served by the live site and regenerated by the export/ chain from master_delivery.blend.

Reproducing

Blender 5.2 headless (blender --background --python scripts/<name>.py), Python 3, Node for web/. See docs/tech_notes.md for the Blender 5.2 findings, export/README.md for the bake and export chain, web/README.md for the viewer.

Licence

Code (scripts/, export/, web/, docs/usage/*.py): MIT, see LICENSE. Images, renders, textures derived from photographs, and the documents: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, see LICENSE-IMAGES.md. Reference photographs are from Wikimedia Commons under their own licences, listed with author and licence per file in reference/photos/ATTRIBUTION.md. The hero comparison photo is by Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0.