Orbital
A brass orrery with eight mineral worlds, turned by hand.
The live preview runs real 3D in your browser, so on this device it can take longer to appear and scroll less smoothly. The video above shows the full site.
A launch site for ORBITAL O-01, a made-up contemporary orrery: eight stone planets on brass arms round a brass sun, standing on a ceramic plinth. It opens in an observatory where visitors turn any of the eight real planets in 3D, then a pinned scroll turns Earth into polished lapis, assembles the instrument around it and lifts the planets away to show the gear train. Below sit a planet atlas, three object studies, a composer for the metal, the mineral palette and the atmosphere that saves a 1600 x 2000 portrait, a downloadable specification and a short FAQ. The orrery is built in code, the observatory's planets wear Solar System Scope's maps, and the backdrops and material photos are generated images. For makers of instruments, clocks, home objects and any premium physical product.
How it's made
A brass sun and eight worlds
The orrery is three.js geometry: a ceramic plinth lathed from a profile at 128 segments, a chapter ring of 120 instanced ticks, 180 knurls round the edge, and a brass sun with eight planets on arms at their own heights. Sizes, distances and speeds are composed for the eye, not to scale.
A gear train that meshes
Four wheels of 60, 32, 24 and 28 teeth sit on matched pitch circles, each extruded with five curved openings. Every driven wheel turns the opposite way at the speed its tooth count gives.
Stone drawn on a canvas
The eight stones run grey jasper, honey calcite, lapis lazuli, red jasper, banded agate, golden onyx, amazonite and blue sodalite from Mercury out. Each planet's grain is drawn on a 512 x 256 canvas from one colour, Earth wears a generated lapis texture, and three mineral palettes (Celestial, Ember and Glacial) redraw them on demand.
From Earth to instrument
A pinned section plays one scroll value through four chapters: Earth with its real day map and clouds, the map blending into polished lapis between 8 and 29 percent, the instrument assembling round it up to 70 percent, then the arms and planets lifting away from 80 percent to show the movement. With reduced motion it holds on the finished instrument.
Real planets in the observatory
The hero and the atlas share a second viewer that puts each planet on a 128-segment sphere with Solar System Scope's maps (4K for six, 2K for Uranus and Neptune), plus Earth's normal, roughness and cloud layers, Saturn's ring and an atmosphere shader. The planet on screen loads first and the rest load while the browser is idle.
Lit like a product shot
A dark studio of four softboxes is baked into the reflections, with a key light casting a 2048 shadow map, a rim and a fill over it. The key slides with the pointer, and the rim and fill take the colour of the chosen atmosphere.
Compose your own
Visitors pick a finish (Champagne brushed brass, Palladium satin palladium or Obsidian black titanium), a mineral palette, an atmosphere and an orbital pace from 0.25x to 4x. The instrument renders to a 1600 x 2000 PNG portrait in the browser and the specification downloads as a text file, with no order and no account.
In this kit
src/
Full source. The complete site as its own project, ready to run.
public/
Media and assets. The images, clips, textures and icons the page loads.
models/ (three .glb exports)
third-party-notices/
README.md
Start here. What's inside and how to run it.
LICENSE.md
Commercial license. Unlimited client projects, one person per license, no resale.
ADAPT.md
Adaptation prompt. Fits the kit to your client's brand in an AI builder.
RESKIN.md
Re-skin guide. Colors, type, copy and media, changed file by file.
CUSTOMIZE.md
ASSETS.md
Asset list. Every image and font in the kit, where it came from and its license.
CHANGES.md
Changelog. What changed in each version of the kit.
PROVENANCE.md
Provenance. Where every model, texture and image came from.
THIRD_PARTY.md
Open-source credits. Every library and font inside, with its license.
VERIFY.md
MATERIAL-PROMPTS.txt
SHA256SUMS.txt
SOURCE-PARITY.json
Specs
- Stack
- Vite 8.0 · React 19.2 · three.js 0.186 · TypeScript 5.9 · Tailwind CSS 4.2 · Radix UI 1.6 · Lucide icons 1.31 · GLSL shaders · Procedural geometry · Self-hosted Cormorant Garamond and Manrope
- File size
- 40.2 MB
- Triangles
- 296,134
- Load time
- 3.4 s (opening 3D view drawn; desktop Chrome, RTX 3060, cold cache, median of 3)
- Browser
- Needs WebGL 2: current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Checked in Chrome on desktop and at 390 px wide; Safari and Firefox not tested yet.
- Released
- Oct 2026
- Version
- 1.0.1
From download to client site
Buy it, or get it with a plan
Buy this kit on its own, or get every kit in the collection with a plan.
Download the zip
It shows up in your library as soon as payment goes through. Up to 10 downloads a day, and each link works for 10 minutes.
Run it
Unzip it, run npm install, then npm run dev to open the site on your machine. You need Node.js 20 or newer. The README says how to build it for any host.
npm install && npm run devMake it your client's
Hand ADAPT.md to your AI builder (Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor) with the client's brief, or follow RESKIN.md to change colors, type, copy and media by hand.
Unlimited client projects, one person per license, no resale. Read the license
Designed and coded with AI: the orrery, its gear train and finishes, the stone grain on the planets and the starfield are built in code, while the lapis texture, the three galaxy backdrops and the three material studies are generated images. The planet maps in the observatory, the atlas and the opening Earth are by Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0) and credited in the site footer as the license requires, so keep that credit on any site built from the kit. The fonts are Cormorant Garamond and Manrope under the SIL Open Font License.
Buy LM-15 Orbital
Single kit
Price: $59once
Included with Monthly, Annual and Lifetime.