# Buried City on Its Last Morning

- Collected by: petergpt (collection) (original author unknown)
- Card: Verified rebuild
- Theme: Cinematic animations
- Stack: Three.js CDN · three@0.170.0
- Interaction: Auto
- Licence: prompt is a credited link (Shared publicly by the author; full text with credit, removed on request); rebuild code MIT
- Verified: 2026-11-08
- Original post: https://github.com/petergpt/3d-prompt-collection/blob/HEAD/README.md#prompt-20

## Original prompt

```text
Create a Three.js historical spectacle of Pompeii on the morning of the eruption: a bright, bustling Roman town in full life with the Bay of Naples sparkling beyond — and Vesuvius opening into its towering umbrella column as the viewer scrubs time forward. This must stay luminous and awe-driven throughout: the spectacle of the column, the strange beauty of the falling ash, the human story told with dignity at distance — never gore, never black murk. Open on the living town thirty minutes before the eruption, streets full. No title screen, menu, loading state, or ruined-city start.

If you use Three.js, add an import map before the module script mapping "three" and "three/addons/" to the same pinned version, and import only via those names. Everything procedural; no external image assets or models.

Single idea: one timeline slider across the most famous morning in history — a living town, a mountain awakening, and light that changes meaning.

#### THE LIVING TOWN
- Build Pompeii bright and specific: the forum with temple colonnades, market stalls under awnings, thermopolium counters with embedded jars, fountains at crossroads, wheel-rutted stone streets with stepping stones, courtyard houses glimpsed through doors, painted facades and election slogans as colored bands, gardens and vineyards at the edges.
- People with routines everywhere: bakers, water carriers, children, dogs, porters, a school group, harbor traffic on the blue bay. Vesuvius stands green and pastoral above it all.

#### THE TIMELINE
- One master scrubber across about three hours: tremors ripple awnings and topple an amphora; birds leave in flocks; the mountain cracks a white plume that climbs into the colossal pine-tree column, sunlit on one side, shot through with lightning flickers; day shifts to bronze as the veil spreads; pumice begins to fall like gray snow, gathering on rooftops; people gather belongings and stream toward the harbor in lamplit groups under a glowing amber sky.
- Every stage must remain spectacular and legible: the column is the hero — vast, layered, beautiful and terrifying; the falling ash catches light; lanterns and the column glow keep the final stage luminous rather than dark.
- Scrubbing backward restores the morning perfectly — the slider is a time machine, not a one-way movie.

#### SIMPLE EXPLORATION
- Orbit, pan, zoom; reset to the hero forum view with Vesuvius framed at the street end. Presets: rooftop panorama of column over town, harbor view back at the coastline and mountain, street-level among the evacuation, and a distant bay view of the full umbrella cloud.
- Controls: the time scrubber with play and speed only. Tiny HUD: time since first tremor. Compact collapsible UI.

#### PERFORMANCE DISCIPLINE
- Instanced town and crowds, the column built from layered billowing shader volumes kept efficient, ash as budgeted particles with accumulation maps, devicePixelRatio clamped to 2, quality selector thinning far town before the column or forum. Smooth on a modern laptop.
```

Known issue: Where the umbrella meets the brown haze, the haze puffs show as soft separate blobs.

Prompt collected by petergpt; original author unknown (https://github.com/petergpt/3d-prompt-collection/blob/HEAD/README.md#prompt-20) via 3dmotion.io/e/buried-city-on-its-last-morning