A muscle car stands up under the El and throws the first punch.

Two cars, five streets, no referee

The fight starts where two avenues cross under a steel elevated line, but it does not have to stay there. The block is a grid of five streets, each with its own trouble. The El Avenue has steel columns and a graffiti-covered train overhead. The traffic avenue has six lanes of cars that brake, honk and swerve. Crosstown has steam stacks and junked cars. The construction street is half blocked by a trench and concrete barriers. The market street is packed with fruit stands, hot dog carts, delivery trucks and people.

Firehawk fights on foot with jabs, heavy punches, kicks and combos. Changing into a car costs energy, and so does changing back. In car mode you can boost down the avenue and ram your rival at full speed. You can also burst out of the car into a flying punch. Health does not come back between rounds. Energy does, and it refills faster when you are standing.

Redline plays by the same rules. It blocks, dodges rams and strings combos together. Drive away and it transforms and chases you through the streets, cutting corners and ramming through anything light enough to push.

The robots take damage you can see. A heavy hit can tear off a door, a fender, the chest plate or a wheel, and the piece skids across the street. It stays gone when you change back into a car, so a car with missing wheels grinds along on its bare hubs, throwing sparks. Hit the transform button at full speed and the car launches into the air, rolls, unfolds in mid-air and lands in a three-point superhero landing that knocks everything nearby flat.

The street fights back. Punches knock over trash cans and newsboxes. A thrown robot goes through a shop window. Hit a hydrant and it sprays for half a minute. Knock down a lamppost and that stretch of road goes dark. Parked cars dent, catch fire and explode, and one explosion can set off the next. Every broken thing goes on a property damage bill. The bigger the bill, the more police arrive: first sirens, then cruisers, then a helicopter searchlight.

Learn the moves

Close in with the jab, then keep pressing buttons during the swing to chain the next hit. An uppercut launches the other robot into the air, and you can keep hitting it before it lands. Watch the blue energy bar. The marks on it show the cost of a transformation and of the Hawk Dive special.

From the chest plate to the tail lights

Build notes: one car, cut into armor

Read the original Firehawk article, published October 5, 2026.

Robots. The earlier Firehawk film study looked blocky, so this version starts over in Blender. A Python script builds each car body as a smooth loft of cross sections, cuts the wheel wells, and adds the lights, vents, spoiler and decals. Then it slices the car along real panel seams: nose, hood, fenders, doors, roof, quarters, trunk and tail. Each piece becomes robot armor. The hood becomes the chest, the doors become back wings, and the wheels ride on the shoulders and calves. The robot underneath stands about 4.6 meters tall with long legs, a narrow waist and tapered limbs.

The second pass. A concept sheet set the look for the rebuild: a comic-book hero build with silver armor over black mechanics, gold trim, red running lights, gold V-shaped horns and a gold phoenix on the hood. The hood now stands up as a shield-shaped chest plate. The front wheels sit in the shoulders, and the rear wheels ride the outside of the legs. The spoiler, tail lights and exhausts become a backpack. The hands have working fingers and thumbs, and new joints at the collarbones and toes let the punches and the landing read better.

Animation. The same script poses the robot and bakes 17 clips, including idle, walk, run, six attacks, blocks, hits, knockdown, get-up, a victory pose and the transformation. The legs use a small two-bone solver so the feet stay planted during punches. The transformation moves every panel along a curved path on its own schedule, so the car assembles in waves instead of snapping together. The script exports two GLB files that Three.js plays with its animation mixer.

City. The street borrows ideas from the earlier City Explorer prototype, such as sodium lamps, wet reflections, rooftop water tanks and graffiti. Window lights are drawn by a shader, so no two floors match. Light streaks on the wet road stretch toward the camera. The elevated line has its own passing train.

Scale and the street. The first version made the robots look small because the street was wrong: the parked cars were oversized and the lanes were 6 meters wide. A second Blender script now builds the city objects at real sizes: a 5.35 meter sedan, a 5 meter yellow cab, a box truck, a police cruiser, litter baskets, hydrants, newsboxes, mailboxes, cones, sawhorses, jersey barriers, dumpsters, phone booths, fruit stands, a sidewalk scaffold, 9 meter cobra-head lamps and 1.75 meter pedestrians. Lanes are 3.2 to 3.5 meters and sidewalks 4 to 5. Each object is a light physics body in the game, so it can slide, tumble and break.

Sound. Punches, crashes, engines, the train and the crowd come from a local sound library. The transformation layers servo whine, panel clanks and a lock sound from the original Firehawk film. The synth soundtrack is generated in code.

Changelog

v1.2: new robots, armor damage and a cinematic opener. Rebuilt robots after a new concept sheet, with a gold phoenix chest and articulated hands. Nine new animations, including a sprint, dodges, a taunt and the superhero landing. Armor tears off in combat and stays off in car mode. An aerial transform ends in a landing shockwave. A skippable opening sequence follows the car through the streets, and the menu now opens instantly. Building windows show rooms behind the glass, and the image is sharper.

v1.1: real scale, a reacting city and pursuit. Real-size 1980s cars, props and pedestrians from Blender; a five-street grid with live traffic, construction and a market; destructible props, burning and exploding cars, a property damage bill, police heat with cruisers and a helicopter; fleeing crowds; and a drive-away chase with a chase camera.

v1.0: first playable. New Blender robots and cars for Firehawk and Redline, 17 animation clips, a 1986 New York intersection under the El, best-of-three rounds, combos, blocking, car mode with boost, drifting and rams, a transform strike, knockdowns, a slow-motion KO and a victory scene.

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