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The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace

Originally published 2026-08-05 on Advisory Hour.

Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-08-05. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.

Original post

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The Apostate Engine is an absurd hardware that exists between the intersection of the imagined and what-if. The engine emerged in one of those combinational chemistry mixes of the mind. “Let’s just toss this together and see…” But, it had a beginning.

The experiment began with me exploring new ways to put post-processing effects to work inside ThreeJs. The bloom effects are such an interesting technique-then Apostate emerged. It’s wonderful and bizarre. A visual treat and mental adventure that every long-time subscriber to my substack experiences.

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The Apostate Engine puts to work something new in my local 3d pipeline.

The something is CAD support. Not just using Blender, but also opensource modeling tools that are more likely to build a thing “proper”. The big idea is that I’m using freeCAD in combination with blender as a pair. Two tools driven by AI, trading tokens for far more interesting constructions. Since the constructions are more real, grounded by the freeCAD software, it tips into much more interesting world building. Thus, the Apostate Engine.

The word “Apostate” once held less religious associations. The original sense of the word as someone that had rejected the tribe. The Apostate Engine then isn’t just a glorified production of a sci-fi engine vehicle, it’s a deliberate construction of an engine that rejects the very notion of engines. It’s the same thing my first car did, as well as the servo motors of one of my hexapod robots.

I’ve written on other attempts at modeling real world engines before using freeCAD, which is available below.

That was a classic commercial airline engine. The Apostate is otherworldly and weird. It’s an engine that was born from a wild idea. I asked a frontier model to build a new engine based on an art style that I term “Wet Graffiti Cel”

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The Apostate Engine

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The Apostate Engine started as a demonstration of bloom effects for post-processing in threejs. I wanted to see what else I could do. Post-processing bloom around a robot and spaceship, even lights worked well. What if I did something really just… weird?

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

And so there are controls on the Apostate Engine that permit you a range of bloom exploration exercises to mix color and motion with the engine. Each one of these becomes an artistic expression unto itself, as the scene is in motion.

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

But wait, there’s one more thing…

I wondered a speculative future where it becomes inconsequential to just build things outside of computers and in the real world. Computers for me have always been the poor man’s way of running experiments. What if there’s a nearby world where I could just build things, in the real world? What if… the engine were CAD accurate? The engine would need power, a harness and more. How would the AI do in constructing such a crazy looking engine? It would do well enough that this might have been a feature in a sci-fi franchise.

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The funny thing is that I didn’t quite get a CAD accurate engine. Instead, the model built a sci-fi cad software and then put the engine into it. I remember reviewing the final deployment, “Oh, so that’s why it took so long. The AI built an entire CAD software in threejs?”

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

It’d be interesting to iterate even further and deeper into this sci-fi CAD software. For example, there’s a mechanism to do an exploded view and some other modeling capabilities. It has me think that it’d be plausible to make a 3d scene that could be modeled in realtime-not just adjusted, but more blender-esque.

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The Apostate Engine is available in the gamelab. The entry in gamelab includes an about page. And there you can learn more, and this mysterious “30-part machine”.

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The gamelab is available on my site at this URL. It’s become an interesting place of different techniques and ideas that have grown out over time. You can even make out the improvement and compounding loop that’s inherent to the work I’m doing. Proof, perhaps, that it’s just the reps that matter.

https://www.ericrhea.com/gamelab/

The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace gallery image from the original Advisory Hour post.
The Apostate Engine: Weird Aerospace gallery image from the original Advisory Hour post.

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