Live, in this page
This is not a video of a seal
It is being drawn, from scratch, sixty times a second, by your graphics card. It turns on its own, and on a desktop your pointer moves the light across it. There is no 3D library behind it and no model file. The whole thing is a page of maths describing a struck piece of steel and the light falling on it.
Which matters for one commercial reason: it weighs 5 KB. The film of the same object, further down this page, weighs 1.3 MB. Same object, roughly two hundred and seventy times the bytes.
Falls back to a still image on anything without WebGL2, and for anyone who has asked for reduced motion. It stops rendering entirely once it scrolls off screen.
Then and now
The same object, built twice, ten years apart in technique
The hero film on this site is the first method: render it once, beautifully, and play it back. It is what almost every impressive site you have seen is doing. The demo above is the second: describe the object once and let the browser draw it. Neither is simply better, and the differences are worth a practice owner understanding before anybody spends money.
| Then: the pre-rendered film | Now: real time in the browser | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A film of the object, rendered once and played back as the reader scrolls. | The object itself, drawn from maths every frame in the reader's browser. |
| What it weighs | 1.3 MB, one video file. | 5 KB, no image, no video, no library. |
| What it can do | Exactly what was rendered. The camera path is fixed the day it is made. | Responds to the pointer, the scroll, the time of day, anything you can measure. |
| Where it works | Everywhere. Any phone made in the last decade plays a video. | Anything with WebGL2, which is most things, and the still image where not. |
| Changing it later | Re-render and re-encode. Hours, and the file changes for everybody. | Edit a number in the shader. Seconds. |
The other method
And the film is still the right answer most of the time
For a practice site the reader opens once, on a phone, in a car park, a pre-rendered film is usually the better trade: it is heavier, but it is identical on every device and it cannot fail. We reach for real-time when the page needs to respond to the person reading it: configure something, explore something, react to what they choose. Not to prove a point.
Being able to build both is what lets us pick. An agency that only has one of them will recommend that one.
Free · No install · No obligation
A fast, memorable site cannot fix an enquiry nobody answers
We contact you the way a new client would, by search, phone and web form, then show you the work you could be winning. Scored on three things: are you found, is the enquiry answered, does anyone chase it.
The offer behind the demo
Bespoke websites for UK clinics and accountancy practices, built to a speed budget the build checks rather than a promise we make. The 3D is available where it earns its place, and we will tell you when it does not.