How I Built a 60 FPS 404 Page With Live Video Background Removal
Most 404 pages are boring. You spend hours designing the actual website, animations, interactions, and visual identity — and then when someone visits a URL that doesn't exist, they get: 404 — Page Not Found I wanted to see if I could make that experience feel like an actual part of the website instead. So I built a 404 page with four animated 3D characters : a shark, cactus, raccoon, and a…
Most 404 pages are dull, consisting of a simple "404 - Page Not Found" message. The author wanted to make that experience more engaging by turning it into a part of the website. They created a 404 page featuring four animated 3D characters: a shark, cactus, raccoon, and a duck with an eccentric personality. Initially, the author tried rendering the characters as real-time 3D scenes, but it was demanding on CPU and GPU resources, causing performance issues.
The main challenge was removing the natural video backgrounds while maintaining smooth rendering at around 60 FPS. The solution was to separate the processing and display resolutions. By processing the video at a lower resolution than the final displayed size, the author managed to significantly reduce processing load while still achieving a visually convincing result.
The main takeaway was that performance optimization doesn't always mean reducing the size of the final output. Sometimes, making the expensive intermediate steps cheaper can yield better results. The author open-sourced the project on GitHub, inviting other developers to experiment with it and provide feedback on performance, rendering architecture, video processing, memory usage, and background removal methods.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
