Eiffel Tower

What it is

A procedurally generated 3D model of the Eiffel Tower — the wrought-iron lattice, the four curved corner rails, the arches and the platforms — built from the monument's real proportions in code rather than loaded from a mesh file.

Every cross-brace is placed by rule rather than by hand, so the structure reads correctly whether you are looking at the whole silhouette or down into the ironwork.

The silhouette is the shape Eiffel derived rather than drew: a taper chosen so the wind load above each level is carried down into the legs instead of bending them. Here that curve is ten control points, smoothstep-interpolated, hung on the real proportions — 330 metres to the tip, platforms at 57, 115 and 276. Four corner rails follow it segment by segment through twenty-eight levels, belts square the corners every other level, and two diagonals brace each bay, so the lattice narrows as it climbs rather than thinning out.

It is also a good test of building geometry by rule. All 384 beams are placed from parameters — leg spread, level heights, brace counts, taper — so changing one number reshapes the whole tower consistently instead of breaking a seam, and every one of them is stretched from the same unit box in a single instanced mesh. That is the difference between a model and a generator, and it is why this one can be inspected from any angle without falling apart at the joints.

How to use it

• Drag to orbit the tower.
• Scroll to zoom.
• Two-finger drag or right-drag to pan.

More experiments

• Rocky — webgl, three.js, r3f
• Ferrofluid — webgl, three.js, r3f
• Weather Pixels — webgl, three.js, instancing

See every experiment