Shoreline: Walney

Painting my home coastline in code. A creative-coding art piece, work in progress: north Walney Island and the Duddon estuary in Cumbria, looking toward Black Combe, rebuilt in the browser with three.js (WebGPU).

▶ Visit: https://tekano.github.io/shoreline/
▶ Just watch (a looping tour with sound): https://tekano.github.io/shoreline/walney/?play

It's a "reality meme": take the real place and get the feeling right. The ground is real survey data, the colours come from my own photos, and the rest is painted with shaders: sky, sea, grass and light. It's made in conversation with Claude Code, steering by eye the way you'd art-direct a shot. The devlog tells the story.

West Shore, wet sand and cumulus	A grey Irish Sea day	Orion over the dunes in January

What's real and what's painted

Real	Painted
Terrain: Environment Agency 1–2 m LiDAR, dunes, flats, channels and Black Combe at true height	Sky: a physically based atmosphere (air, sea haze, ozone; Hillaire 2020) in real units, metered like a camera; ray-marched cumulus, an overcast deck
Land cover: OpenStreetMap saltmarsh, sand, tracks, roads and fields, plus 13,000 building footprints and the wind turbines	Sea: directional waves layered by distance, waves that bend to the real shoreline and break, lace whitewater, sun glitter and glints
Sun and stars: the true sun path and ~75 bright stars for any date and time over Walney, at their real brightness
Night lights: street lamps along the towns' mapped roads, floodlit BAE sheds, and the offshore wind farms' aviation lights, all at real intensities	Marram: ~270,000 blades moving in one shared wind, with hero tussocks up close
Colours: sampled from my own photos and a 360° pano from the Sandscale dunes	Tide: a real-height tide slider that floods the flats and marsh, with swash, pools and mirror-wet sand

Hero view: the dune top at Sandscale Haws, where my pano was taken. Pick it from the View menu. Everything else is a bonus to explore.

Run it locally

python tools/serve.py        # then open http://localhost:8792/  (it goes to walney/)

It needs a browser with WebGPU (current Chrome, Edge or Safari). walney/README.md explains the terrain and land-cover pipeline (terrain/) and the camera tools.

Where it started

Before Walney, Shoreline v0.1 combined two open-source projects into a beach-wave toy. It lives on at hybrid/:

• Saltreach's shallow-water simulation;
• reality-js's foam lace, water colour and glints.

Walney still uses ideas and code from both: the lace foam, glints and absorption. Its noise texture and vendored three.js come from Saltreach.

Credits

• Saltreach © 2026 Techartist, MIT (licence): the v0.1 base (solver, world, camera) and the noise texture.
• reality-js © 2026 ai_impl, MIT (licence): the foam lace, absorption, surf-zone colour, crest light and glint ideas, ported from GLSL to TSL.
• three.js r185, MIT (threejs.org), vendored in vendor/.
• lil-gui 0.20, MIT (licence): the v0.1 look panel.
• Terrain © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2022, Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Land cover and buildings: map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. The derived files in walney/data/ share that licence.

Licence

Code: MIT, see LICENSE. Data: as credited above.