Soft Bodies

· 1 min · Quick read · Joost van der Laan

Six soft ink-colored bodies sag, collide, and can be grabbed, moved, and piled together.

Focus the Lab, use the arrow keys to select a body, press Enter or Space to grab or release it, use the arrow keys to move it while grabbed, and press Escape to release or clear the selection.

Six ink blobs built as rings of Verlet-integrated points: distance constraints keep each ring taut, area preservation keeps it plump, and a ten-iteration constraint solver lets them squash against the walls and stack on each other without exploding. Grab one and fling it.

No libraries, no WebGL — Catmull–Rom splines through the point rings so they read as ink blobs rather than polygons, rendered in the site design tokens. The dragged blob flashes primary; everything else is ink. In the site’s reduced or off motion state, the blobs sit at rest and remain draggable (direct manipulation is user-initiated, not autoplay).

SOFT BODIES 02 · VERLET INK