[00]The alloy
chrome is a gradient that remembers where the light is
Surface
banded gradient · dark→steel→white repeated = rolled metal
Sheen
steel base · oil-slick screen layer
Merge
SVG goo filter · beads fuse where they touch
Reflection
gradient angle tracks the pointer · highlights slide live
Control
polish slider raises or kills the specular
Status
🟢 molten · contrast AA · reduced-motion sets the metal
[01]Six castings
the metal vocabulary, one pour at a time · scroll to reveal
01 · reflection
Rolled chrome
A dark-steel-white gradient band reads as curved polished metal. Rotate the angle and the highlight travels — that's the whole illusion of reflection.
02 · oil slick
Thin-film colour
Conic spectrum, screened.
03 · bead
A drop of mercury
A single radial gradient with a hot specular corner becomes a liquid sphere.
04 · fusion
Two become one
The goo threshold welds touching beads into a single seamless body of metal.
05 · spectrum
Steel + sheen
Mono, alive.
06 · hardness
The liquid that looks solid
005 was soft and organic; 009 uses the same goo merge but dresses it in metal — the same physics reading as molten chrome instead of paint.
[02]Polish
drag to buff the metal · low = matte pewter, high = mirror chrome
specular
70
Field note: there's no environment map and no ray-tracing here — "reflection" is a banded CSS gradient whose angle follows your pointer, so the bright band slides like a real highlight would. Goo-merge from 005, dressed as mercury. Cheap optics, expensive look.