The FS-45 folds into a robot
This is the FS-45, the spaceship I built from the Flyshare mark, and the robot that was folded inside it the
whole time. One switch turns the ship into the robot and back. It all runs live in the browser, so you can turn
it, zoom in and watch it from any side. This page needs a script to run; here is what it shows.
How it moves
The ship hovers about three metres above a small drawn planet. Switched over, it curls into a ball, rolls
forward and bursts open into a robot almost 16 metres tall, which lands on a round podium. The moment its feet
touch the ground is measured from the motion itself, and that is when the podium turns red, from the centre
outwards. The way back runs the other way: the robot pushes off the ground, folds up in the air, closes into the
ship, and the engines light again.
How it was built
The ship was modelled in Blender and cut along its own construction lines into 1,098 parts, each hanging on a
skeleton. The motion was worked out with springs and momentum rather than drawn curves, then exported with every
part sampled 480 times a second. In the browser every part is placed again in every frame and drawn with
WebGL 2, flat and without noise, so each frame is finished the moment it appears.
The sound
There is no audio file. Every sound is computed from the movement while it happens: a click where a part
stops hard, the servo from the force of the mechanism, the engines from the same value as the flame, and the
impact at the measured moment of contact. Sound starts with the first touch and can be switched off at the top
right.
Made by Marc Fleischer for the Flyshare Universe. The way back: the FS-45 spaceship and
the Flyshare Universe.