Step Inside · Episode 1
Step inside The Milkmaid
Vermeer gives us one view, from one spot. Here the kitchen is rebuilt in 3D from the painting, so you can walk around her, see the table from the side, and watch her finish the pour she has held for about 365 years.
Loads about 18 MB. Drag to look around, scroll or pinch to move closer.
The room is a reconstruction guided by the painting, not the painting itself: the camera can go where Vermeer's never did, so what you see there is our best guess. The figure that moves was generated to match her; “The painted pose” shows her exactly as painted.
The film
78 seconds: through the canvas, around the room, and back out. Preview cut with a temporary narration track.
Vertical versions: full film (9:16) · 15-second teaser
How it was made
- The painting. Rijksmuseum's open-access image of The Milkmaid (about 1660), public domain.
- The room. Built from the painting with a Gaussian-splat scene generator, then baked with a painterly pass so it reads as paint rather than photo.
- The figure. Her painted pose lifted into 3D from the canvas; the moving figure is rigged and animated to finish the pour.
- In your browser. Gaussian splats rendered with splat-engine on PlayCanvas, streamed from our content server.
Read and hear the guided viewing
The Milkmaid is one of the ten free narrated stories: the light from one window, a single nail in the wall, the bread made of dots of light and the foot warmer in the corner, one detail at a time.
Open the story →On iPhone and iPad
148 paintings with narrated stories in Simple Art.
Coming soon to the App Store