Design notebook Explore the miniature

A coastal atlas · From reference to geometry

A little La Jolla

La Jolla is the cliff above the water, a walk past the Cove, and the light in a third-floor corner of the Design and Innovation Building. I wanted those places to sit together on this site, small enough to turn in your hand.

01 · Direction

Generated design studies

I started with coordinated generated views, then ran Tencent's Hunyuan3D-2mv locally to see what shape it could recover.

Generated front design study of the La Jolla miniature, with campus landmarks above the coastline
Front study. Generated design direction for the coastal miniature.
Open original front study
Generated opposite view of the coastal miniature, showing the pier, cliffs, and campus buildings
Reverse study. A coordinated generated view of the same miniature.
Open original reverse study

Generated design studies, not photographs or the live browser renderer. The production atlas uses sourced geometry.

02 → 03 · Shape and architecture

From shape study to authored geometry

The reconstruction recovered the overall coastal mass, but softened the glass bays, library supports, and trees. I kept it as a shape study and built the interactive landmark geometry in Blender.

02 · Local reconstruction

The recovered shape

Actual Blender clay render of the local Hunyuan multiview reconstruction, showing the broad coastal mass and softened architectural details
Raw reconstruction. Actual Blender clay render of the locally inferred Hunyuan3D-2mv shape. Retained as a generated shape study.
Open original reconstruction render

03 · Authored in Blender

The production miniature

Noon capture of the actual Three.js renderer showing the authored La Jolla miniature with distinct Geisel supports, Salk courtyard, DIB glass bays, and Scripps Pier
Runtime poster · noon. Still captured from the actual Three.js renderer using the authored miniature. The live model remains in the current case study.
Open original runtime poster

The viewpoints and artistic compression differ; this is a qualitative comparison of the design process.

Architecture worth looking for

It is useful to compare the silhouette with the architecture that needs deliberate modeling: the folded DIB bays, Geisel's stepped crown, the Salk courtyard, and the thin structure of the pier.

Their distances are deliberately compressed. On the live page, the translucent atlas underneath uses real OpenStreetMap coastline and road geometry; the buildings above it are an artistic composition.