Box - 04-27-01 - Quadcopter

in Workbook 4 Gallery

Student: Zijun Zhao  (GitHub: gyt1Kf)

This scene contains two airplanes flying over an airfield: one is a biplane, and the other is a monoplane. The radar at the airfield is pointed toward the monoplane.

Student: Guanhao Wang  (GitHub: HowellWang04)

The quadcopter is built from scratch using primitive geometries: a flat body box with a dome, four arms each ending in a motor cylinder and cross-blade rotor group, and a landing gear with skids and legs. Propellers alternate between clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation.

Instead of a simple circle, the aircraft flies a figure-8 (Lissajous) path with sinusoidal altitude variation. The heading is computed each frame from the velocity derivative using atan2, so the nose always faces the direction of travel with a forward pitch tilt.

As the quadcopter flies, it leaves an ink trail on the ground rendered via a Canvas2D texture updated every frame. Each ink point has a core dot and a bleed halo; opacity decays over 9 seconds to simulate drying ink, so the trail gradually fades behind the aircraft as it completes the figure-8.

Student: Jiaqi Ye  (GitHub: Jiaqi-Ye)

Student: Pavan Thodima  (GitHub: pthodima)

  1. Radar points at the propeller airplane
  2. There is an x-wing flying above the airplane in the opposite direction
  3. Some stars in the background.
  4. Switchable cameras (Essentially 4 different cameras, I tried using a 5th to lerp between them smoothly, but the code got too complex).
  5. The airplane also moves up and down while going around in a circle, the barrel roll is actually a bug that stems from how I handle pitching up and pitching down, but it looked cool, so I left it in.

Student: Yulong Wu  (GitHub: seealake)

In this scene, each quadcopter features a cylindrical fuselage as its core, with four arms extending diagonally outward; the top of the fuselage is capped by a transparent, light-blue cockpit dome. I designed a conical nose cone to indicate the aircraft’s forward direction. Structurally, each arm is fitted with a propeller; during flight, these blades rotate in an alternating pattern—clockwise and counter-clockwise. Additionally, each motor mount is equipped with an illuminated navigation light that emits either a red or a green glow. On the ground are two small radar stations, each with a dedicated radar antenna designed to lock onto and track one of the quadcopters. One aircraft follows a circular flight path, while the other flies horizontally toward its target before landing.

Student: Tyler Tang  (GitHub: ttang56-lang)

I have a biplane and a plane with two propellers on its wings, the blue/yellow one spins occasionally, the red/black one flies up and down and at a slower speed. The radar flips between the two planes periodically.

Student: Yeheya Mohammad  (GitHub: YeheyaMohammad01)

There are two separate aircraft instead of one, and both are fully animated with spinning propellers. They also follow different flight paths and each has its own tracking radar dish.