MATERIAL STUDIES / NO. 009
A slice of summer.
A little wobble.
Too soft to share.
Soft-body physics. The wedge is a volumetric mesh of 1,728 tetrahedra solved with XPBD at 960 Hz in fixed, bounded substeps. Edge constraints carry elasticity (the rind is stiffer than the flesh), a signed-volume constraint per tet and one for the whole body preserve volume, and inverted tets are pushed back out. Damping removes only deformation, so it can still tumble. The knife really cuts: every tet the blade’s plane crosses is clipped and re-tetrahedralised, the surface is clipped and capped, and each half becomes its own soft body.
WebGPU rendering. Native WGSL, five passes: a tinted shadow map, an interior pass that measures thickness, the studio floor and knife, the jelly — Beer–Lambert absorption, refraction, Fresnel, light through thin edges, bubbles in rest space — and a neutral tonemap. A dense surface mesh with modelled seeds is embedded in the tets, so seeds stay put as it bends.
PostgreSQL variants. Melon colours, firmness, damping and material JSON, plus knife blade, handle and geometry, come from melon_variants and knife_variants through a small API. Switching writes uniforms and reuses the same buffers. Nothing is recompiled.
MATERIAL STUDIES / NO. 009