Governance
Renlabs · 2025
Themis in fog under one moving spotlight, from the Torus DAO app.
Overview
The Torus DAO app opens on this scene: Themis, the Greek figure of justice, in black fog under a single spotlight. I made it for the governance app, where the light followed your mouse. Here it drifts on its own.
The idea
The DAO app is where the network governs itself: proposals get voted on, agents apply to be whitelisted, and the DAO decides. Themis holding the scales is the obvious symbol for that. The landing used to be a still picture of a Greek statue, and in the scene that replaced it, three buttons floated next to her, leading to proposals, the DAO dashboard and whitelist applications. The statue was the menu.
There's only one light that matters. It sits off to one side and sweeps slowly, so the folds of her robe and the scales she holds fall in and out of shadow. All of the mood comes from that light.
Under the hood
- A lighter model. It was 772k triangles and 3 MB. I welded and simplified it to 193k triangles and 590 KB. Going lower broke the thin chains on the scales, so that's where it stopped.
- Light in the air. The haze in the beam is ray-marched: each pixel steps along its view ray through the spotlight's cone, checks the light's shadow map at every step, and adds up what it finds. Each ray is cut to the part inside the cone first, and the march runs at a quarter of the screen resolution, since haze has no sharp edges. It's then added only behind her, so her outline stays sharp and the haze never greys her out.
- Dust. 700 motes drift around her in one draw call. They use the same light and shadow math, so they only glint inside the beam and go dark in her shadow.
- No post-processing stack. An effect composer applies fog and tone mapping in a different order, which brightened her and made the clouds vanish. So the scene draws straight to the screen, and the grain and vignette are one triangle that multiplies the finished frame.
- Nothing from other servers. The Draco decoder and the cloud texture are self-hosted.
For a while she went missing entirely. drei's soft shadows inject shader code that current three.js no longer supports, so her material failed to compile and she stopped drawing while the clouds and stars carried on. Variance shadow maps brought her back.