EXP·015 Throw — an interactive pottery wheel: a lump of clay drawn as wireframe rings spins on a wheel; drag against its silhouette to neck it in or belly it out, and necking makes the pot taller

Design Lab · Experiment 015 · lathe

Throw a pot.

A lump of clay spins as a stack of wireframe rings. Press and drag against its silhouette — push from outside to neck it in, from inside the bore to belly it out. Clay is conserved: thin the waist and the pot grows taller. The spin trues your marks while you work.

44 rings · painter's algorithm
scroll
[00]The wheel

a solid of revolution you can argue with

Substrate
2D canvas · no WebGL — a pitched camera and depth-sorted rings fake the volume
Clay
44 profile stations, one radius each · the pot is just an array of numbers
Truing
each frame every station relaxes toward its neighbours — the wheel smooths what you gouge
Conservation
volume holds · Σr² is kept constant by scaling height, so necking lengthens the pot
Tearing
press a wall thinner than the wheel allows and it sprays — then clamps and heals
Status
🟢 spinning · wet clay → fired glaze
[01]Six marks

the potter's vocabulary, one gesture at a time

01 · rings

A pot is a profile

Every vessel here is one curve swept around an axis. Draw the stations as ellipses, back to front, fill each opaque — the stack reads as a solid.

02 · silhouette

You shape the edge

The pointer never touches "3D" — it only negotiates with the outline.

03 · truing

The spin fights back

Diffusion pulls every station toward its neighbours, so a jab becomes a curve. Faster wheel, faster truing.

04 · conservation

Clay goes somewhere

Choke the waist and the pot rises in your hands — the same material, redistributed. The most potter-feeling line of code in the file.

05 · tearing

Too thin, it sprays

Real clay has a limit; so does this one.

06 · the kiln

Firing is a palette swap

Press Fire it and the wet bone-grey wireframe glazes terracotta-to-ochre down the body — the reward for a pot you like. Re-centre to wedge it back into a lump.

[02]Wheel speed

drag the slider · slow = your marks survive, fast = the wheel erases them · drives the hero wheel too · throw on this canvas as well

speed 40
Field note: concept homage to Keramos by Apostolos Christodoulou — an interactive pottery wheel whose README describes profile stations, truing diffusion, and shell conservation. That repo is all-rights-reserved, so nothing here is from its source: this is the idea rebuilt from first principles in ~150 lines, with a simpler clay (one radius per station, no azimuth memory) and a kiln of its own.