Forged.build is a studio website turned into a living 3D world. Instead of pages, you’re scrolling through a WebGPU‑powered workshop. Michael Modena (ex-Active Theory cofounder, now founder of creative studio Forged) built the experience, aiming to “make a studio website feel like a place” rather than a deck of thumbnails. Visually it’s cinematic: all of the indirect light is baked into textures (giving that moody global illumination), and subtle specular glints and reflections move as you scroll to sell the motion, a trick Michael calls “fake tracing.” The car model uses full PBR shading, while most walls and props rely on baked light maps plus a lightweight micro-facet shader for highlights, so it all looks rich without melting your GPU.

Under the hood it’s a neat Blender‐to‐WebGPU pipeline. Scenes are built and lit in Blender, then exported as Draco‑compressed GLB models with KTX2 lightmap atlases, and imported into a custom WebGPU engine. Every material uses shared shader modules (PBR, microfacet BRDF, etc.) that you can tweak in an in-app GUI. The result is a hybrid renderer: all the color bleed and ambient light is baked into textures, and only the bright highlights (the shimmers on leather, the gleam on paint, floor reflections) are computed in real time. This mix means it feels very real and dynamic (your brain thinks it’s a room) but still runs smoothly on a normal laptop or phone.

Go try it yourself: surf to your favorite browser (WebGPU enabled) and slowly scroll through the garage. Peek at your DevTools network panel to see the GLBs and KTX2 maps loading, and watch how the lighting subtly shifts as you move. Michael actually wrote a deep dive about the project too [1, 2], and he’s on X/Twitter as @forgeddotbuild if you want to ask how he did it or see what he builds next. It’s a great demo of modern WebGPU: small team, big visuals, and plenty of clever bits (procedural shaders, baked+realtime lighting tricks, etc.) that any graphics geek can learn from.