A colorful 3D countryside scene rendered in WebGL with clay-like wooden train tracks winding through hills, trees, and farm buildings in a soft, toybox art style.
If you've ever dumped a box of wooden train tracks on a living room floor and tried to close a loop before a toddler ate one, Choo-Choo World will feel instantly familiar. It's a browser-based train set builder, rendered in WebGL with a soft clay-like aesthetic. You click track pieces into place across a rolling countryside, stack them skyward if you're feeling ambitious, then hit play and ride along with your train. There's a first-person camera mode. There's a day/night toggle. There are farm animals that, reportedly, fly. It is, in the best possible sense, a toy.
The project comes from Lusion, the Bristol-based creative studio.The technical foundation is Three.js on top of Angular, with all environment assets baked into a single UV texture for both day and night cycles. That's a deliberate performance decision: keeping the GPU happy while rendering a scene this rich on mobile is not trivial, and the single-texture approach keeps draw calls low without starving the scene of visual warmth. The 3D models are built in Blender and Cinema 4D, with Lottie handling the UI animations, and the whole thing ships as a PWA.
Go build something absurd. Stack tracks until the train is threading through clouds. Share the result with someone who needs a reason to smile. You can poke around the network tab if you're curious about asset loading, and the case study on Medium by Pauline Stichelbaut walks through the 3D pipeline and UV optimization in useful detail. Worth a read if you do any real-time asset work for the web.
- Live Demo: https://choochooworld.com
- Author: Lusion (X, Instagram, LinkedIn)