Living Scrolls

Bringing traditional ink wash paintings to life as explorable 3D worlds.

Built by Chelsea Xinyi Chen and Inyoung Cho, Living Scrolls transforms Chelsea’s grandmother’s paintings into spaces you can walk through, with drifting autumn leaves, flowing water, and cranes.

The goal: turn a still art form into a living space while preserving its hand-painted character.

Highlights

• Personal family artwork reimagined as immersive 3D environments
• Painted elements modeled, rigged, and animated
• Animated Gaussian splats bringing a waterfall to life
• Traditional brushwork carried into explorable worlds

How It Works

The team used Codex to stitch four images together, then generated 3D environments with Marble. Tripo AI modeled and rigged individual elements from the paintings, while Codex helped create animations and assemble the scenes.

The result extends the artwork beyond the scroll, adding movement and depth while keeping the original paintings at the heart of the experience.

Tech Stack

• World Labs / Marble — 3D world generation
• Tripo AI — Modeling and rigging painted elements
• Codex — Image stitching, animation, and scene assembly
• Mint — Used for world generation in another scene

What’s Next

Exploring Atlas, mobile experiences, and immersive projection installations that adjust to viewers’ movements, creating the feeling of stepping inside a painting.