How a drone show is made

This page gives you the mental model behind Celestium. After reading it you will know what a shape, a slot, a clip and a bake are, and you will know the path from an idea to a show that is ready to fly. No drone or 3D experience is needed.

A quick tour of the editor

A show is a list of pictures

A drone show is a fleet of drones that fly from one picture to the next. Each drone is one point of light (or one point of smoke and fireworks by day). You do not steer drones one by one. You design the pictures and say when each one appears. The app works out which drone goes where.

Five ideas cover almost everything:

Term	What it means
Shape	Something you draw: a circle, a rectangle, text, a spline, an image.
Slot	One point of a shape that a drone will fly to. A circle with 100 slots needs 100 drones to look complete.
Formation group	A folder of shapes that counts as one picture. Drones can only be sent to a formation group, never to a loose shape.
Launch Pad	The ground grid where the fleet starts and lands. Its Drones value is the real size of your fleet.
Timeline	The show from start to end, in seconds. Clips on the timeline say what happens and when.

Slots and drones should match

Aim for one slot per drone. If a formation has more slots than you have drones, some slots stay empty and the picture has holes. If it has fewer, the spare drones get no slot and stay where they are.

Drones fly to slots

The first thing you send the fleet to is a formation group. Every drone gets a slot, chosen so that the total distance flown is as small as possible. When you send the fleet to the next formation, the drones get new slots and fly there. Between two clips, they hold still in the picture they reached.

Three kinds of clip do most of the work. They live on the Launch Pad's Drones channel:

Clip	What the drones do
Takeoff	Leave the launch grid and fly to a formation. Usually the first clip.
Track	Fly to a formation, then follow its slots if it moves.
Return	Fly back to their places on the launch grid. Usually the last clip.

More on this in Drone events.

The timeline

The timeline sits at the bottom of the editor. It shows the channels of whatever you have selected, so click an element first.

• A channel is one row. Examples are Drones, Colors, Effects and Pyro.
• A clip is a block on that row, with a start and an end. Drag it to change when it happens. Drag its edges to change how long it lasts.
• The playhead is the line that marks the current moment. Drag it, or press Space to play.

Colours work the same way. Drones are dark by default, and only colour clips light them. A clip on a formation paints that formation's slots, and the drone flying each slot shows that colour. See Colours.

Design mode and Bake mode

The editor has two modes. You always know which one you are in, because Bake mode shows a banner at the top of the viewport.

	Design mode	Bake mode
What it is for	Building and changing the show	Reviewing the real result
What you see	A quick preview	The trajectories calculated by the bake engine
How drones fly	Straight lines, with no collision avoidance	Routed around each other, within your flight limits
Can you edit?	Yes	No, it is read-only. Click Exit to go back
Right panel	Properties	Statistics
Exports	Selected formation (.fsf)	Flight paths, video, pyro report

A bake is the step that turns your design into a real flight plan. Your show is saved, and our servers then calculate the path of every drone for the whole show. This routing keeps drones inside your speed and acceleration limits and keeps them apart by the minimum separation you set on the Launch Pad. That value is 2 m by default.

Each bake is stored as a numbered version (v1, v2, v3), so you can load an older one from the arrow next to the Bake Show button.

The preview is not the flight

A clean preview in Design mode does not prove the show is safe, because the preview ignores collisions. Only the numbers from a bake tell you what the drones will do.

From idea to flight in seven steps

1. Plan the show. Decide on the story, the length, the number of drones and the place. Good shows are simple pictures that hold long enough to be read. See Designing good shows.
2. Set up the site. Set the show's location in Environment, then set the fleet size and the flight limits on the Launch Pad.
3. Build formations. Create shapes, text or images, and put them in formation groups. Add your soundtrack too.
4. Sequence the flight. On the Launch Pad's timeline, place Takeoff, Track and Return clips and point each one at a formation group.
5. Light it. Add colours, colour effects, motion effects and pyro.
6. Check and bake. Fix what the Safety checks report, then bake the show. Review the statistics and charts of the real flight.
7. Deliver. Render a video for your client and export FSP flight files for the fleet.

You will go around steps 3 to 6 many times. A show usually gets better with each bake.

Before you fly

Celestium designs and simulates a show. Flying it is a separate job. A qualified pilot must review the baked show against the real site, the real fleet and the local rules before any drone leaves the ground.

Next

Check that your computer is ready in Requirements, or go straight to Create your first show.