Create a maximum-ambition Three.js experience inside Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa at true physical scale: the viewer stands at oarsman height on one of the boats while a forty-foot wall of woodblock ocean hangs overhead, falling at one-hundredth speed - always falling, never landing - with Mount Fuji small and serene through the gap beneath the crest. This must not be a flat picture with parallax layers, a tabletop diorama, a realistic water simulation that abandons the woodblock style, or a dark stormy scene. It is the most famous image in Japanese art experienced from inside, at the size it depicts, in its exact visual language.
The goal is scale terror rendered in ukiyo-e: the wave as a genuine three-dimensional mountain of stylized water whose every surface obeys Hokusai's print language - flat Prussian-blue color bands, pale linework, clawed foam - while behaving as a real volume the camera can move around, under and above. Achieve the style with cel/toon shading, posterized color ramps and outline rendering; achieve the foam claws with instanced claw geometry along the crest, not particle mush.
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 assets.
#### FIRST FRAME - THE PRINT, EXACTLY
- Open with the camera positioned so the scene reproduces the print's exact composition edge to edge: the great wave rearing on the left with its overhanging claw of foam, the deep trough, two low oar-boats with rowers flat against them, the smaller foreground wave echoing Fuji's shape, and Fuji itself centered small in the distance with its snow cap.
- Style fidelity is non-negotiable: the print's exact restricted palette (deep Prussian blue, paler blues, warm cream sky bands, the boats' pale wood and dark hulls), flat posterized shading with crisp banding, fine dark contour lines on every form, and the subtle off-white of aged paper in the lightest tones. Any drift toward glossy realistic water is failure.
- Hold for a breath as a convincing print. The first mouse movement breaks the flatness: the wave has volume, the boats sit at different depths, the trough is a real valley of water. No menus, titles or instructions.
#### THE WAVE AT TRUE SCALE - THE MIND-BLOW
- The default position after the opening is ON THE BOAT: camera at a crouching oarsman's eye height, the deck pitching gently beneath, rowers ahead and behind, and the wave filling the entire upper field of view - a cliff of blue water with its crest overhanging the boat, foam claws the size of trees reaching down.
- Time inside the scene runs at roughly one-hundredth speed: the wave IS falling - the crest advances with glacial menace, claws extend finger by finger, spray droplets drift like snow - but it never completes. The terror is permanent and the viewer has unlimited time to study it.
- The wave must read as a volume from every angle: walk the camera around it, under the overhang (the print's own viewpoint made literal - looking up through the claw at the sky), above the crest looking down into the trough at the boats, and from Fuji's direction back through the gap.
- Secondary water is fully built: the foreground wave echoing Fuji's silhouette (stage this alignment deliberately - it is the print's famous visual rhyme), the churning trough, interlocking swell patterns to the horizon, all in banded ukiyo-e blues with linework.
#### THE STYLE AS RENDERING LAW
- Cel/toon shading everywhere: stepped color ramps, zero smooth gradients, colors quantized to the print's palette; a full-screen outline pass draws crisp dark contours on silhouettes and interior form edges, weighted like brush linework.
- Foam is drawn, not simulated: the crest carries hundreds of instanced claw shapes - curved, tapering, fingered forms straight from the print - that grow, reach and fragment in ultra-slow motion, shedding drifting dot-spray (instanced discs, not fog).
- Woodblock truth in close-up: subtle paper-grain texture in flat areas, faint registration warmth at color edges, linework that thickens and thins. A screenshot from any angle should pass as a lost Hokusai plate.
- The sky carries the print's quiet horizontal bands; light is soft and directionless like a print, with form read through banding, never through realistic specular.
#### DYNAMISM - SLOW, TOTAL, PERPETUAL
- Everything moves at the scene's dilated pace, and nothing is static: the wave's advance, claw growth, drifting spray, the boats pitching and shipping water in slow surges, rowers straining in long slow strokes with cloth rippling, the foreground wave rising, gulls hanging nearly motionless over the trough, cloud bands sliding imperceptibly past Fuji.
- The boats are alive: three slender oar-boats with correct low profiles, rows of oarsmen flattened against the hulls in the print's exact poses, oars trailing slow wakes, water sheeting off gunwales in stylized banded runnels.
- A very slow global cycle (minutes long) lets the wave advance meaningfully - the crest creeping visibly closer to the lead boat - before seamlessly recycling to the print's exact composition, so long viewing rewards attention and the reset is invisible.
#### EXPLORATION AND CONTROLS
- Immediate free flight with smooth inertia plus orbit fallback; reset returns to the exact print composition. Presets: the print view; the oarsman's seat under the crest; inside the claw looking up; above the crest looking down at the boats; the Fuji-aligned trough view; the foreground wave and Fuji silhouette rhyme.
- Compact controls only: time dilation (frozen / one-hundredth / one-tenth), spray density, and photo mode.
#### PERFORMANCE
- The wave as sculpted mesh with shader-banded coloring (cheap), claws and spray instanced with LOD, boats and figures modest geometry carried by linework, distant swells as shader displacement.
- Quality selector reduces spray and claw counts and outline sampling before ever sacrificing palette accuracy, the outline pass or the first-frame match.
- Smooth on a modern laptop, devicePixelRatio clamped to 2. The outcome: the wave that has been about to fall for two hundred years, finally hanging over your own head. Prompt collected by petergpt (collection) ; the original author is unknown on GitHub. github.com/petergpt/3d-prompt-collection/blob/HEAD/README.md#prompt-47 . Copies include this credit. 
Wave at Monumental Scalepetergpt (collection) · Water & sky