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Compass Rose

A brass ship's compass with an engraved rose and a glass dome, its two-colour needle swinging and settling. Loops perfectly.

3D object, V2 Objects3DSeamless loop, verified124 lines of codev1.0.0

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Compass Rose preview
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Effect controls

Presets

1
0

Whole extra turns of the needle per loop.

0.3

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View code Sample video (default settings, 2.6 MB)
Info

What it is

A ship's compass lying face up in studio light: a polished metal bowl, a card engraved with the thirty-two points of the rose, degrees and N, E, S, W, a glass dome and a red-and-white needle that swings, settles and hunts around the card. Choose the metal (brass, silver or rose gold), how far the needle swings, whether it also spins whole turns, the dome's opacity, the backdrop colour and whether the camera sways.

Reuse it in your own idea

  • Travel title: Brass, gentle swing.
  • Night-sea mood: Silver, night blue.
  • Energetic intro: Wild needle.

Which part is reusable

src/compass-rose.js is the ingredient your AI reuses. demo.js is only the example scene around it, and uses chrome-material only for the demo.

Good to know

  • The card's lettering uses the system serif font.
  • The needle swings by a formula; it is not a physical simulation.

Technical details

Technical details
Implementation
Three.js 0.185.1 (WebGL) · ES module src/compass-rose.js
Exports
  • createCompass({ metal?, swing?, spins?, glass? }) => { group, setProgress(progress), dispose() }
  • METALS: { brass, silver, rosegold }
Dependencies (exact)
  • three@0.185.1 (source) — Renderer, geometry and shader materials.
  • chrome-material@1.1.0 (demo) — Studio environment light, backdrop and contact shadow.
  • apw-runtime@1.0.0 (demo) — Demo harness.
How it fits a scene

Coordinates: The compass is centred on the origin with radius 3, lying in the xz plane, card face up (+y), north towards −z.

Lighting: A warm key light with a shadow map and the studio environment.

Timing: setProgress(progress) sets the needle heading; frames render in any order.

Output
1080×1080, 30 fps, 16 s · procedural (computed from the frame number) · seamless loop — The needle's heading is a sum of sines of whole cycles of the loop plus whole turns, and the camera sway is a sine of the loop, so the last frame meets the first.
Tested
Rendered 480 frames on 2026-10-06 in Chrome 154.0.8037.97 headless on Linux 7.0.0-38-generic (x64), Node 22.14.0 (WebGL 2 via SwiftShader (software)). Same frame twice from fresh pages: identical. Loop: Frame 0 vs end state (progress 1): mean |Δ| 0.0000, max |Δ| 0 of 255.
Performance
A few thousand triangles, one 2048 canvas texture and a shadow map: well under 2 ms a frame on an integrated Intel GPU. Software WebGL renders in about a second a frame.
Export a video yourself
Download the source, then in the folder: npm install npm run render -- compass-rose/1.0.0 --out my-video.mp4Needs Node 18+, ffmpeg and Chrome/Chromium. Add --params my-settings.json (from Copy settings) for your own settings.
Version
1.0.0 · sha256:2b172bba6c5cdb7c…
Files
License
MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 AI Pixel Wizard. Released under the MIT License. See LICENSE in this folder. License details
Provenance
Adapted from the owner's threejs-sketches/objects-scenes/compass-rose (MIT) and rebuilt for AI Pixel Wizard in October 2026 as an original studio object: a canvas-engraved 32-point card, a metal bowl, a glass dome and a swinging needle on an exact loop.
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