A minimal online store for a ceramics studio that doesn't exist

There is no studio and nothing to photograph, so every picture is rendered. Each piece is turned from its catalogue curve into a 3D model and path-traced with three-gpu-pathtracer, on WebGPU in headless Chrome, standing on a seamless paper sweep. Daylight is a large soft window to the left, a white card bouncing light back from the right and a pale sky above. Lamplight is one small warm lamp up to the right, a breath of fill from the left, and a dark room.

Each photo is traced to 16 or 32 samples a pixel, which is still grainy, then cleaned up on the CPU by Intel Open Image Denoise 2.5.1, guided by clean passes of the colours and surface directions underneath. It is finished with the Khronos PBR Neutral tone curve, which is made for showing products in their true colours, and a touch of dither so the backdrop never bands.

All 126 renders ran on a laptop's integrated graphics, a Ryzen 5 3450U with Vega 8, at about 40 to 50 seconds a photo at 16 samples. Building a scene costs the tracer 15 to 20 seconds, so each piece is set up once and only its glaze, light and camera change between shots.

They are published as AVIF at quality 82 with full colour detail, because WebP broke Lamplight's near-black backdrops into visible blocks. A product photo 1,080 pixels wide averages 15 KB.

A glaze is painted onto each piece along its section — from the centre of the foot, up the outside, over the rim and down to the floor — so it can behave like glaze. It stops at a dipping line about 6 mm above the foot that wanders a little round the piece, with a thicker roll just above it and bare toasted clay below. It pools deeper on the floor and low inside, less so on a plate, whose well is too shallow; it thins and pales where it breaks over the rim; and it runs in narrow streaks down the outside.

Iron specks are placed by surface area at a real size in millimetres, so a mug and a dinner plate are flecked alike. Malai carries 2.6 a square centimetre, between 0.18 and 0.75 mm across, each with a faint halo where the iron bleeds into the glaze. Gloss and roughness are painted too, which is why Neem shines and Geru looks dry.

The clay is made to look thrown: faint spiral rings that rise one spacing per turn, a body slightly out of round, more so towards the rim, and a rim that is not quite level. The mug and the jug get a pulled handle that flares where it meets the wall, and the jug a pulled spout.

The page colours are sampled from the photos' own backdrops, so a photo sits on the page like a print rather than a pasted rectangle.

Both versions of every photo are in the page, and CSS shows only the current light's. The other is hidden and lazy, so it is not fetched. A small script sets the light before the first paint, so there is never a flash of the wrong one, and it follows the system setting until the visitor picks. With reduced motion switched on, the switch is instant.

The sequence is 24 stages of one kulhad, each drawn as a section with the same five landmarks in the same order — underside, outer wall, rim, inner wall, floor — and resampled to the same number of points, so any two stages blend point by point. That is how throwing works too: opening pushes the top of the lump down into a floor, and pulling raises the walls out of what is left.

The clay changes as it goes: wet and glossy on the wheel, matt once leather-hard, pale after the first firing, chalky once dipped. Twelve of the 24 stages are rendered, which is enough for the crossfade to read as continuous at half the render time. The last is the finished kulhad, cut from its real catalogue section and glazed in Neem exactly as the product photos are.

Filters are written into the address with the browser's own history API, so changing one never loads a page, and they are read back when you arrive with a filtered link or press Back.

The bag lives in the browser's local storage and stays in step across open tabs. Checkout is switched off, and the bag says why.

Search answers as you type, from names, Hindi names, kinds of piece, glazes and what a piece is for: “dal” finds the katori, “कटोरी” finds it too, and “/” opens search from anywhere.

It is a static export: thirteen pages of plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The home page loads about 187 KB of compressed JavaScript, React and Next.js included. Motion, about 44 KB more, loads only on the shop, the one page whose grid re-flows.

The photographs are the weight that matters, and they are small: all 354 photo files on the site, every width in both lights, add up to 3.4 MB, and each page asks only for the width its layout needs. Instrument Sans is a single variable file; the Devanagari typeface is used only for the small Hindi names, so it is not preloaded.

The light switch and the glaze picker are radio groups that work with arrow keys. The bag and search are dialogs that close on Escape, the bag holds keyboard focus while it is open and hands it back when it closes, and search results can be walked with the arrow keys.

Body copy and small labels clear 4.5:1 contrast in both lights. With reduced motion switched on, the reveals, the opening curtain, the drawing and the change of light all happen at once. Without JavaScript, every section is still there.

Cloudflare serves it as a Worker with static assets only: no server code, just the files the build writes. A response header keeps it out of search results, because a shop that sells nothing has no business in them, and the photos, whose file names carry a hash of their contents, are cached for a year. This page is the one meant to be found.