Meridian GT

// what it is

An interactive teardown of the Meridian GT, a front-mid-engined grand tourer that does not exist. You drag a slider and the car comes apart in order — skin, then structure, then driveline — with every one of its 128 parts carrying a part number, material, mass, and a note on why it is built the way it is.

// the problem

Any exploded-view demo of a real car runs straight into licensed CAD and copyrighted imagery. Inventing the car removes that problem but creates a harder one: you now have to produce a car's worth of believable geometry with no model to load.

// decisions

1. 01

   No mesh assets at all — the body is a function

   The shell is a parametric loft through 17 hand-tuned cross-sections along the car's length. Nothing is downloaded or imported; the surface is evaluated at load time. That also means the silhouette can be changed by editing numbers rather than by reopening a modelling tool.

2. 02

   Every panel is a patch of one shared surface

   Door, wing, and roof are not separate models placed near each other — each is cut from the same underlying surface and built out as a real shell with thickness. This is why the panels fit: they cannot drift apart or leave gaps, because they were never independent in the first place.

3. 03

   Mechanical parts are composed, not sculpted

   Suspension, driveline and engine internals are built from a small vocabulary of lathes, tubes and extrusions. A wishbone is a description rather than a mesh, which keeps 128 parts maintainable by one person.

4. 04

   Navigation works from either direction

   Click a part in the scene and the tree opens and scrolls to it; click it in the tree and the camera flies there. Labels dodge the UI panels and the viewport edges so callouts stay readable at any camera angle — the fiddly detail that decides whether the thing feels like a tool or a toy.