Dev uses Claude Opus to simulate oil paint, watercolor and gold leaf in cross-platform app
No-Citron-3963 · reddit · 2026-09-20
An indie developer extended their Claude-powered simulation of traditional art materials — oil paint, watercolor, gold leaf, pastel, crayon and pencil — into a Rust + wgpu app running on iOS, Android, Web and Windows, now released on the App Store with a browser demo.
Their workflow: write a design markdown collecting ideas and reference papers, slice work into consistent task sizes, and start a fresh Claude session per task — reportedly the best practice for both speed and accuracy, handling complex work almost entirely with Opus. Human expertise still drove the Paint Field architecture and paper reading, while Claude iterated shaders and delivered major memory/speed gains, running smoothly even on an iPhone SE (3rd gen). Next targets: ink and etching.
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