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3D and simulation

A real-time, interactive 3D scene of their choosing.

  • Opus 5
  • Opus 4.8
  • Fable 5

The prompt

Build one real-time 3D experience that demonstrates the absolute ceiling of your 3D and simulation capability. You choose what it is. That decision is part of what's being evaluated.

Context you should know: this is going into a video comparing you against other frontier models, shown to a large audience, and your work will be credited to you by name. Every model gets this exact prompt. So go nuts and show people what you're actually capable of.

Requirements:

1. **You pick the concept.** A scene, a simulation, a world, an object, an environment, something with no existing name for it. Decide, commit, and make the choice itself impressive. A spinning cube on a gradient is a wasted turn.

2. **Technical ambition is the point, and it has to look genuinely realistic or genuinely art-directed** — photoreal materials and lighting, or a fully committed stylized look executed to a professional standard. Untextured primitives and flat-shaded blobs are failures. Pull from whatever best showcases you — including but not limited to: PBR materials and physically-based lighting, HDRI environments and image-based lighting, post-processing stacks (bloom, SSAO, SSR, depth of field, chromatic aberration, film grain), volumetrics and god rays, atmospheric scattering, custom GLSL shaders, raymarching and signed distance fields, GPU instancing at scale, particle and physics simulation, fluid, cloth and soft-body dynamics, procedural geometry and terrain, water and caustics, character or object animation, inverse kinematics, morph targets, point clouds, LOD systems, deliberate camera choreography.

3. **You have free reign to look up how to use any of these**, and to add any other technique you think demonstrates more. The list is a starting point, not a boundary.

4. **It has to run in real time and be interactive.** The viewer can move through it, orbit it, or otherwise affect it. Target a smooth 60fps — a beautiful scene that stutters is a failed build.

5. **Single self-contained `index.html`.** Any library via CDN. No build step, no server, no API keys.

6. **No hotlinked 3D assets or stock textures, but you may pull in open source libraries freely** — geometry generators, noise libraries, physics engines, shader libraries, anything on a CDN. Generate geometry and materials procedurally or author them yourself.

7. **QA it for real.** Load it, move the camera through the whole scene, stress it, watch the frame rate. Fix anything that stutters, z-fights, clips, or throws console errors.

The exact prompt from the published test.

The builds

Opus 5 · Screenshot of the buildRuns in your browser

The full write-upOpus 5 vs Opus 4.8 vs Fable 5Read the article

Written by

Pat Simmons. Pat tests AI models and tools on the AI for Mortals YouTube channel.

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