Sunarhai Mata Digital Jhanki
Sunarhai Mata Digital Jhanki
This project is a creative-tech experiment inspired by the beautiful Sunarhai Devi tradition of Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India. The artwork is created by hand, separated into individual layers, and assembled programmatically into a real-time digital scene using a custom renderer.
The artwork is brought to life using OpenGL, and GLSL shaders. Built using C and published on Web using WebAssembly (Wasm) and Emscripten.
The tableau is meant to be seen on desktop 💻 with a decent GPU 🚂 but honestly I am surprised how well it performs on old phones' browsers 📱 too!
Watch it on YouTube
Devlogs
I have documented my journey of creating this project from scratch 📋 and exploring all the techniques and methods I have used. These are separated and posted according to my progress and how much I wanted to pack in a single video.
Post related to the above Devlog
Post related to the above Devlog
More #devlogs coming soon.
Drawing Timelapses
Enjoy the timelapse of the manual drawing process 🎨 with a curated list of contemporary Indian music playing in the background. These videos are decimated, i.e. still frames are removed. The resulting process is sped up five times as this has taken me enormous amount of time.
About Sunarhai Devi
The Sunarhai tradition is a remarkable part of Jabalpur's cultural heritage, with an estimated 150–175 years of continuity 🕉️. Around 7–8 idols are associated with different locations across the city. During the celebrations, approximately 10–15 kg of gold jewellery is placed on the idol by the people of Sarafa Bazaar, Jabalpur's jewellery market. There is also a Nunhai idol adorned with silver jewellery instead of gold.
This fascinating tradition inspired me to explore how traditional Indian devotional art can meet modern real-time graphics technology.
Technical Highlights
- Hand-drawn digital artwork and layered parts
- Export pipeline to assemble pieces in Texture Atlas (using FastPack)
- Custom realtime renderer in OpenGL written in C
- Material system based on GLSL shaders
- Procedural animation system, batching system
- WebAssembly (Wasm) compilation using Emscripten
I aim to visually improve the experience further in coming days. More technical deep dives 💻 into the asset pipeline, texture packing, C programming, OpenGL, GLSL shaders, and WebAssembly can be seen in the devlogs mentioned above.
I often make such tech crossover dharmic projects, follow me on X to find out more, thanks.