You land on a motorcycle. It's not moving. You are not moving. The entire world is rotating beneath you like a vinyl record, each groove revealing a different environment from French artist Yamê's album Ébēm. Deserts, red forests, oceans, a king's museum. The trick is so good you don't notice it at first. You just think you're driving. That illusion, the feeling of motion where there is none, tells you everything about the care behind this project. There's also a motorcycle mini-game tucked inside the experience, a kind of Subway Surfers on two wheels, which shouldn't work on an artist's promo site but absolutely does.
Built by Studio 9P, a Paris and Bordeaux-based studio. The whole thing runs on Three.js, with 3D modeled in Blender and textures painted in Procreate. What makes the rendering stick is a custom cell-shading pipeline that flattens the 3D into something closer to a Moebius comic panel. It gives the visuals a deliberate, illustrated quality that sidesteps the usual glossy-WebGL look entirely. They shipped it in phases over roughly two months, synced to Yamê's single release schedule, building out a shared asset library with the film production team along the way.
Worth noting: the navigation concept came from Yamê himself, who apparently knows his way around interactive references. The site won FWA of the Month and an Awwwards Site of the Day, which feels right. Go explore the disc. Poke around the environments. Try the mini-game. And if the cell-shading approach interests you, view source and pay attention to how the materials are set up. There's a lot of good thinking in there about making 3D feel hand-drawn without losing depth.
