Pixel-art jet engine cutaway
Pixel-art jet engine cutaway in 9:16: follow one gulp of air through suck, bang and blow. Copy the prompt into Claude, edit the text, and render the MP4 free.
A two-spool turbofan, cut in half lengthways and drawn as chunky pixel art, opens at full thrust on a blurred fan. It drops into slow motion and follows one tagged gulp of air through three chaptered stages, then speeds up until the flame pulses merge into a steady burn.
Change the title and its accent-coloured lines, the opening fact strip, the combustor and thrust facts, the stand plate, the three chapter chips and the part labels. The vertical, looping format suits Shorts, Reels and TikTok explainers, school science content and aviation channels.
Use it for
- How jet engines work explainer
- Aviation channel Shorts and Reels
- Physics class engine demo
Specs
- Length: 36 seconds
- Format: vertical 9:16 (1080x1920), 30 fps
- Built with: Three.js in HyperFrames
- Category: Explainers
What happens, beat by beat
- 0 to 2.9 s. Hook: three-quarter close-up of the blurred fan, title [title, e.g. HOW DOES A / JET ENGINE / WORK?] and [hook fact] already up. Camera swings back to the whole engine.
- 2.9 s. Title folds shut, tag flips to SLOWING..., needle falls from [max N1, e.g. 100]% to [idle N1, e.g. 25]%.
- 3.9 s. SLOW-MO 1/32 with a push-in. Chapter 1 chip slides in; a pink-bracketed gulp enters with a yellow comet trail. Labels AIR IN, FAN.
- 5.9 s. A counter rides the gulp, PRESSURE X1 rising row by row to [pressure ratio, e.g. 40] and flashing. COMPRESSOR, FUEL SPRAY.
- 9.8 s. The gulp lights on the downbeat: [event word, e.g. WHOOMP!] in big two-tone outlined type with a ray burst and a 2-frame camera kick. Chapter 2, push into the combustor, [heat fact], FLAME RING…
- 13.8 s. Chapter 3, camera slides aft. Marching dashed lines run forward along each shaft: pink DRIVES THE COMPRESSOR, green DRIVES THE FAN.
- 19.7 s. X2 every 2 beats (1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2) with push pulses. Light-ups quicken until they merge.
- 23.6 s. REAL SPEED. Wide pull-back, [thrust fact], labels [bypass label, e.g. BYPASS AIR = 80-90% OF THRUST] and [core label].
- 29.5 to 36 s. "NOW... FULL THRUST!" Needle sweeps up, exhaust turns red-orange, the engine shakes. Title types back on; the camera pushes into the opening close-up.
Look: toon light, pixel outlines, dithered blur
- Four-band toon shader, one top-left light, shadow bands mixing toward the room navy rather than black.
- Outline pass from depth and normals: a depth step darkens the pixel to 36% of its own colour, a crease to 62%. Particles write alpha 0 so the pass skips…
- Motion blur with no new colours. At speed, render 8 sub-frames of the spools into an atlas and let each pixel pick one through a 4x4 Bayer matrix. A translucent…
How the prompt opens
Make a 36-second, 9:16 (1080x1920), 30 fps explainer that loops seamlessly. One continuous camera move around a real 3D two-spool turbofan, cut in half lengthways and rendered as chunky pixel art. It opens at full thrust on the blurred fan, drops into 1/32 slow motion, follows one tagged gulp of air through [chapter 1: e.g. 1 SUCK], [chapter 2: e.g. 2 BANG] and [chapter 3: e.g. 3 BLOW], doubles the speed four times until the flame pulses merge into one steady burn, pulls back to show bypass air against the hot core, then throttles up into the opening frame. Swap in your own title, facts, labels, numbers and colours, all exposed as composition variables.
The full prompt runs 1,078 words. Copy it free (2 a day) from this page.
Copy the prompt into Claude, or pull the scene into Claude Code and render the MP4 on your machine: how it works.