Kintsugi Lab simulates the Japanese art of kintsugi (金継ぎ, 'golden joinery') — the practice of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. Rather than disguising damage, kintsugi highlights the cracks as part of the object's history, embracing imperfection as a form of beauty rooted in the wabi-sabi philosophy.
The shader generates a Voronoi fracture network on a dark ceramic surface, with each crack filled by emissive metallic gold. The Voronoi tessellation creates naturally irregular crack patterns — wider at junctions, tapering along edges — that closely match the appearance of real broken-and-repaired ceramics. The gold material uses physically-based metallic rendering with roughness variation along the crack width.
Interactive controls adjust crack density, gold emission intensity, ceramic surface properties, and fracture pattern seed. The result captures the contemplative beauty of damage transformed into art.