# Windland: the Codrops case study, and how a two-week city got famous

> In April 2022 Codrops published my case study of Windland, a mini-city built in about two weeks with Blender baking, Draco and MeshSurfaceSampler.

Canonical page: https://andersonmancini.dev/blog/windland-codrops-case-study

Published: 2026-10-11 · 1 min read · Tags: three.js, case-study, codrops, blender, optimization

On **April 25, 2022**, Codrops published my case study, [Windland: An Immersive Three.js Experience](https://tympanus.net/codrops/2022/04/25/case-study-windland-an-immersive-three-js-experience/). Windland is the project people tend to remember, so it deserves a proper celebration.

## How it started

I have always loved games, and I dreamed of an interactive mini-city with saturated colors, like SimCity. The obstacle was that I had neither the 3D knowledge nor a library. At the end of 2021 I took Bruno Simon's [Three.js Journey](https://threejs-journey.com/), and discovered I was a creative developer. The whole project was made in about **two weeks, between shifts at work at Neotix**.

## The goals

- decent realism from game-style post-processing without hurting performance,
- at least 30 fps on as many devices as possible, especially phones,
- a download smaller than 2 MB.

## What made it light

- **Blender for everything static.** The city, sculpted terrain and free building templates adapted to the setting.
- **Natural light with Nishita.** Blender's world node for the sky, baked into a single **2048x2048 floor texture** that contains all the shadows, at no runtime cost.
- **Trees with geometry nodes** for variation in size, shape and rotation, with a density painted by material selection.
- **Draco compression**: the whole model comes out at about 1.2 MB, with Draco sometimes making files 7 times smaller.
- **MeshSurfaceSampler** for the trees in three.js, instead of exporting them all, since exporting every tree made the GPU upload too slow.

## What people did with it

The article came with a free boilerplate, and the project began to show up in curated lists, such as the [Web Game Dev](https://github.com/verekia/webgamedev) list of demos, which links Windland together with the article. Windland was also one of the first projects of mine featured on the [three.js homepage](https://andersonmancini.dev/blog/threejs-org-homepage-featured-projects.md).

## Try it

The city is live at [windland-neotix.vercel.app](https://windland-neotix.vercel.app/), and the project is on its [project page](https://andersonmancini.dev/projects/windland-experience.md). The earlier post about it is [here](https://andersonmancini.dev/blog/windland-first-on-threejs-homepage.md).

## Related projects

- [Windland Experience](https://andersonmancini.dev/projects/windland-experience.md) — First featured project on the Three.js homepage