Responses by Ethan Chiu, developer.

Background: Originally part of a much larger project, The Monolith Project’s site was about 85 percent done when it was halted by the client. Luckily, he understood how much passion and work had been put into it, so he let us release it as a personal project.

Design core: The core style is without a doubt the incredible illustrations of Zao Yu Lin. It was a great foundation that gave us endless inspiration. It was immensely fun to translate his 2-D illustrations to 3-D.

Favorite details: I’m really proud of the scene transitions we were able to accomplish for this site. We had wipes, zoom blurs, 2-D to 3-D object matching, masking, radial transition based on world position, and a sphere ray marched transition as well. 
I'm also proud of the dust, leaves and snow particles that can be pushed around by mouse and gravitate toward the monolith on tap and hold.

Additionally, I’m especially proud of the composable material system, composable particle system, scene transition system and deferred rendering engine that we built for this. These flexible and reusable systems made it feasible to have a site with thirteen different 3-D scenes.

Navigation structure: We wanted it to be a free scrolling website to make it as simple and intuitive to use as possible. For certain key moments, we choose to use a tap and hold to give it a unique feel and impact. At the end of the experience when it loops back to the first scene again, we added our credits, as well as a distinct filter to highlight our team. This was a passion project, so we wanted to make sure our credits were visible in the natural flow of the site.

Technology: We used React Three Fiber to create the site.