Orbital Field
After tribe.ai
Four scenes that are all the same circles. A 3D globe, then three flat constructions, reached by re-seating one list of geometry rather than by building and tearing down scenes. Scroll is a camera and a blend, not a reveal.
Parameters ▾
Scene
Camera (globe)
Ink
One set of circles under four layouts. The blend slider is the whole transition: nothing is added or removed, the geometry is re-seated.
What it actually does
- Scene 1 is a wireframe globe of meridians and latitudes, dotted rather than stroked, perspective projected. Dotted rings densify where foreshortened, which reads as a projected circle far more honestly than a stroked ellipse.
- Scene 2 is a vesica: nested and overlapping circles on the picture plane, now crisply stroked rather than dotted, with a chord drawn between the two lead bodies.
- Scene 3 is a rosette: six equal circles whose circumferences all pass through one hub point.
- Scene 4 is a polar dial: concentric arcs about an off-centre hub, with radial spokes and fine rim ticks that exist in no other scene.
- The bodies persist across all four. They are defined as ring plus phase, so they are carried through every transition without knowing a transition happened.
- On arrival the two leads sweep wide, flat, saturated gradient bands, first around the periphery and then around the centre plane. The band is brightest and densest at the head and spreads as it decays.
What the rebuild taught
- The transition is the feature, and it is cheap: every layout samples to the same number of screen points, so morphing is a point-by-point lerp. Nothing is created or destroyed.
- Appearing and disappearing geometry is per-ring opacity, not deletion. All 32 rings exist in all four scenes; a flat layout simply admits five or six of them.
- Dot spacing must be measured in screen space, not curve parameter space. Parameter sampling looks fine from outside the sphere and collapses to nothing once the camera is inside.
- Wrap the seat index in every layout. An unwrapped radius formula sent bodies on high ring indices thousands of pixels off-screen — invisible in the ring drawing, obvious the moment a body rode one.
- The sweep is not a stroked line. It is a run of soft radial stamps whose radius and alpha taper along the history, which is what gives it that wide, luminous, airbrushed quality.
Rebuild
Hand-rolled yaw/pitch/dolly projection in ~30 lines, four layout functions, and a single blend float in 0..3. The scene buttons and the blend slider drive the same value the scroll timeline does. The type effect was pulled out into its own study so the geometry could be examined alone.
Primitives
Layout morphOne set of geometry under several layouts, blended point-by-point. How a scene becomes another scene without being rebuilt.
ProjectionReal 3D positions flattened by an explicit camera. The source of every honest 2.5D read.
Scroll cameraScroll drives a camera through one continuous scene instead of revealing stacked sections.
Depth cueAlpha, scale or weight standing in for lighting. Cheap, flat, and more legible than shading.
TrailMotion history drawn as decaying echoes. Reads as speed without any blur pass.
Painter sortExplicit far-to-near draw order. Replaces a depth buffer with one sort per frame.