Experiment 014 · from reference to real time

Into the dust.

A small ship. An impossible hull. A signal worth following.
We started with a Grok Imagine image, explored several implementations, and stayed with Fable 5.1 as the scene became DERELICT.

DERELICT running in the browser: a small salvage tug beside the fragmented, plated hull in dusty space.

▶ Enter DERELICT

The version we stayed with

DERELICT

Fable 5.1 · actual browser capture

A salvage tug follows a lost ship’s beacon into the dust. The diorama became an interactive short: arrival, approach, investigation, then something changes. About 3½ minutes, followed by free camera exploration.

Instanced geometry · triplanar plating · cue-driven score

Controls & sound

Enter starts the film. C cycles cinematic, orbit and chase cameras; S skips to the next act. M or Space toggles music. R rebuilds the hull with a new seed. Touch controls provide camera, skip and music buttons.

The site’s “Stop & return” link unloads the scene and its audio.

LEVIATHAN running in the browser: layers of eroded hull plating and tiny lights recede into grey fog.

▶ Explore · Opus 5

An alternate rendering approach

LEVIATHAN

Opus 5 · actual browser capture

A continuous drift beside a vast, eroded hull. Here the structure is a signed-distance field, not a pile of meshes. Leave the camera rail and inspect how layers of plating, recesses and fog hold up in motion.

Raw WebGL · raymarched hull · temporal reprojection

Controls & sound

Click to enter. Drag to look; WASD flies freely. Space/Shift ascends/descends, Q/E rolls. C resumes cinematic drift, M mutes, 1–4 selects quality, and H opens the commands.

The site’s “Stop & return” link unloads the scene and its audio.

The Silent Colossus running in the browser: a blue-thrust ship approaches a massive plated structure, with flight instruments visible.

▶ Explore · GPT 6 Astra

An alternate flight experience

The Silent Colossus

GPT 6 Astra · actual browser capture

A survey flight with three viewpoints, manual piloting and a scanner. The hull is assembled from instanced geometry; a simulation timeline coordinates scan reports, signals and electrical discharges.

Three.js · instanced hull · scan/event timeline

Controls & sound

Begin approach starts the flight. Drag to look, scroll to adjust camera distance, WASD for manual flight, Q/E down/up and Shift to boost. Space scans, C changes viewpoint, M toggles sound and P pauses.

The site’s “Stop & return” link unloads the scene and its audio.

Grok Imagine · supplied reference image

The image gave us scale. The browser needed everything else.

The tiny ship against a wall of dark machinery established the composition and mood. Motion, navigation, readable surfaces and sound had to turn that single viewpoint into an experience.

Grok Imagine reference: a small ship with blue engines beside an immense dark hull in drifting dust. — Generated visual reference—not a screenshot from any of the three implementations.

Implementation notes

Similar silhouettes. Very different machinery.

Source-level observations · no normalized performance comparison
System	Fable 5.1	Opus 5	GPT 6 Astra
The hull	Instanced eroded blocks, buttresses, cables and rubble. Procedural plating is projected across surfaces with triplanar mapping.	A raymarched distance field: stacked plate grids, recessed cells, box-shaped towers and sparse erosion.	Instanced hull pieces, service details and weathered-metal materials, with a scan effect passed into the surface shaders.
The atmosphere	Sky-dome murk, drifting cloud banks, dust and a fog reveal controlled by the director.	Directional fog scattering, distance-ramped density and occluded in-scattering keep deep recesses dark.	Exponential scene fog, a shader sky, stars and dust, with an environment reflection map.
Time and sound	Named film cues coordinate ship movement, text, light and a synthesized score. The ending hands the cameras back to the viewer.	A generative harmonic cloud, drone, wind and metal resonances. Distance to the hull changes the mix.	Scan reports, signals and discharges share simulation time; the synthesized soundscape accompanies the flight.
Rendering budget	Instancing and reduced hull density on touch devices, capped resolution, bloom and finishing passes.	An absolute raymarched-pixel budget, distance-based detail and reprojected temporal history.	Instancing, capped pixel ratio and resolution reduction after sustained rendering pressure.

Challenge notes

A huge object is not yet a sense of scale.

← Back to Notes

01 / Fable · direction

Make the viewer wait for the silhouette.

DERELICT coordinates the approach, thinning dust, camera movement and score through a director timeline. The ship gives the eye a familiar scale; the reveal supplies the distance. It is as much an editing problem as a geometry problem.

02 / Fable · surface

Plating has to survive leaving the postcard view.

The hulk uses a procedural plating texture with seams, rivets, scratches and a height channel. Triplanar projection carries that detail across differently oriented fragments; weathering and roughness stop every block from catching the same clean highlight.

03 / Opus · motion

Remember the surface, not yesterday’s pixel.

Accumulating frames can recover detail from an expensive raymarch. But blending history at the same screen coordinate smears a moving hull. Opus reconstructs world positions from depth and reprojects them into the previous frame before sampling history.

04 / Astra · event timing

A scanner should share the flight’s clock.

Astra’s scan completion, signal messages and electrical events live on a simulation timeline. That gives the instrument panel and the world a common clock, instead of letting independent timers drift apart when the flight pauses.