lofi blue sky

(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ abstraction ♥ a beautiful blue sky — i've been filming the sky for over a decade it is my meditation — sit with me and watch the sky go by ˜”°•.˜”°• hello •°”˜.•°”˜

Version: 0.8.0 · License: MIT · Roadmap · Docs · Live: https://cportka.github.io/lofi-blue-sky/

A procedurally generated lofi sky, synthesized entirely in a fragment shader from a hash. No footage, no assets — a slow, meditative, seamless loop. Half of all skies are the 1×1 origin: the entire frame is ONE pixel of sky, breathing through the gradient — how lofi blue sky began; the rest are grids of flat sky-pixels changing as units (2×2 → 4×4 → 1×N …). Same hash, same sky, on every machine, forever.

A 1×1 sky, five moments across one loop — the entire frame is one pixel, journeying through the sunset:

The thesis

The masterpiece is in the GLSL — one idea executed completely. The platform is the frame.

One shared engine, two frames:

• Target A — the fxhash token (targets/fxhash/). A single, restrained slit-scan sunset, deterministic from $fx.hash, bundled into one self-contained ~16 KB HTML with no network and no external resources — small enough to store fully on-chain (ONCHFS). The disciplined masterpiece: it thrives inside fxhash's limits instead of fighting them.
• Target B — breathe (targets/web/). The generator with the cap off — for now, a small GitHub Pages preview of the live engine (randomize, paste a seed, save a frame). It grows into the full edition: all glitch modes, audio, high-res + video export.

Both are built from the same GLSL core + the same genome — two entry points, one shader set.

The project

lofi blue sky is a long-running internet art project by Chris Portka (djpants · djpants.eth) — a decade of filming the sky, distilled into slow, glitched loops. This repo is the generative engine; the wider project is a body of released animated skies: Website · OpenSea · objkt · Paras · Instagram · X.

See docs/PROJECT.md for the full picture and the museum for the library of released skies.

Engines

One core, swappable engines — each a sky algorithm with its own hash→params key and shaders (docs/ENGINES.md):

• Genesis (above) — half of all seeds are the 1×1 origin (the whole frame as one pixel); the rest are grids of flat sky-pixels, each exactly one colour, changing as one unit (True Clean). The rare movements: Clean Sweep (the sun-bloom sweeping through the bars), Distorted (the smear + crush), and the <1% Classic — the original v1 slit-scan the first canonical picks live in. Canonical.
• Billow — clouds across a blue sky in 20 named types — Cirrus streaks, puffy Cumulus, lens-smooth Lenticularis, wave-rowed Undulatus, Fog, up to the dark Cumulonimbus storm tower. Clean 4 skies in 5. Young; carries the experimental Phase-4 mosaic mode.
• Squall — a clean pixel sky (every pixel breathing on its own phase) that a rare squall sweeps through: big wind dragging whole rows sideways, waves bending the frame, macroblock datamosh and cyan/magenta tearing at the peak. Young and experimental.

Squall — waves mid-burst	Billow — Cumulonimbus	Billow — Lenticularis	Genesis — the <1% classic

The look

Genesis: a sky is a grid of flat, exact pixels sampled from a sunset gradient at each cell's centre — and half the time that grid is 1×1: the whole frame is a single pixel, its one colour journeying deep through the gradient over a slow 20–34s seamless loop (the deepest pulse in the family). Larger grids (2×2 → 4×4 → 1×N …) change each cell as one unit on its own phase: the pixels of a low-res sky video. A seed in the True Horizon window carries a crisp, always-distinguishable colour edge at the horizon. The slit-scan smear and ordered-dither "bit-crush" survive only in the rare movements. Muted, dusty, quantized palettes — Sodium, Powder, Olive, Periwinkle. See docs/AESTHETIC.md and the palette sheet.

Quickstart

npm install          # dev tooling only (typescript, esbuild) — zero runtime dependencies
npm test             # version sync + typecheck + deterministic unit suite + self-contained build
npm run build        # → targets/fxhash/dist/index.html (+ upload.zip) and ./index.html (Pages)
npm run render       # local: render in headless Chromium, verify determinism + seamless loop

Open targets/fxhash/dist/index.html?fxhash=<any-hex> or the root index.html in a browser.

How it works

$fx.hash ─► genome (hash → params) ─► engine ─► sky.frag ─► slitscan.frag ─► post.frag ─► screen
            (deterministic DNA)                  gradient    drifting bands   dither/grain

• packages/core/ — the platform-agnostic engine: a deterministic RNG, the genome, curated palettes, the WebGL2 pipeline, and the GLSL passes. Never imports $fx or the DOM UI.
• targets/fxhash/ — wires $fx (hash · rand · features · preview) and builds the token bundle.
• targets/web/ — the GitHub Pages generator UI.

Determinism is the whole game: same hash → byte-identical params → byte-identical pixels, verified in CI and in a real browser. See docs/DETERMINISM.md and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Explore (the live generator)

On the site (full-screen, always looping): switch engine (Genesis / Billow / Squall) with the chips — the same seed reinterprets under it; click the sky to hide/show the panel; click any attribute to reshuffle just that one; ◀ ▶ undo/redo; ⧉ copies the seed and ↻ rolls a fresh one, side by side in the seed row (which takes a pasted hash automatically). Save a frame with the OS screenshot. A hand-tweaked sky is shared as an engine-tagged g:<engine>:… token. See docs/CANON.md.

Two canonical seeds to try — both live in the <1% Classic golden window, rendering as the v1 slit-scan beauties they were first picked as: 00f50f353cf56cfa55f3b32404db3196e7cef86e37bd4b0fbca9304a8dd6097f (the degraded sodium sunset) and 3ebed465933f11af41fb9f999635ca11ea55c1357cdcba0f3d4bc11f9de5ff64 (the olive sky).

Status

Genesis is canonical — each seed's DNA (palette, horizon, bands, sun, loop) is locked by docs/CANON.md + CI. v0.2.0 added the interactive generator; v0.3.0 made engines swappable and started Billow (rolling clouds); v0.4.0 added the museum + fxhash release path; v0.5.0 opened the Genesis key with 2D pixel splits and added Squall (a datamosh); v0.6.0 turned the family toward clean pulsating pixel-grids; v0.7.0 landed True Clean (the entire bar/pixel as one colour changing as one unit) with the rare movements and a visualized True Horizon; v0.8.0 brought it all the way home — the 1×1 origin is half of all Genesis skies (key → v5), Squall gained real wind and waves (key → v4), and Billow grew a 20-type cloud taxonomy (key → v4). Open design calls are in docs/DECISIONS.md; the engine model is in docs/ENGINES.md.

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lofi blue sky is an art project by Chris Portka (djpants · djpants.eth).