Eighteen Swords Aloft

御劍術 · 月下馭十八劍 — a swordsman rises off a cliff above a moonlit sea of cloud and flies eighteen blades through nine formations without touching one of them. Every sword is a critically damped follower: a formation function says where it should be and which way it should point, and the sword chases that with a spring stiff enough to snap and soft enough to overshoot. Nothing is keyframed per sword — swapping formations IS the performance. They pull out of the rock into a ring, wind into a double helix, open as a lotus, drop into a vortex, shell into a fibonacci sphere, draw into one lance, fire past the lens and loop back. Orientation blends from the formation's direction to the velocity direction as a sword speeds up, which is what makes them look flown rather than placed; the ribbon trails are keyed to speed, so only a sword actually moving leaves light. The moon is the only light in the scene. Sky, stars, cloud deck, terrain, the swords and the cloth on his back are all generated at runtime — nothing is loaded. A 13.5 second directed sequence plays on loop. Press F for a free camera (drag to orbit, scroll to zoom), R to replay, space to pause, S for slow motion. The whoosh you hear is triggered per sword as it passes the lens, synthesised with WebAudio, and wakes on your first click. three.js r185 is bundled; there are no other dependencies.

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