The Sunburst Mode: A Ray Fan Centred on Twelve O'Clock

Sunburst is the Radial engine at its most direct: frequency rays fan around protected central media. No rings, no layers, no counter-rotation. One fan of rays, each one reading its own slice of the spectrum, arranged around a hole in the middle that nothing is allowed to cross.

Why the fan starts at twelve o'clock

The ray fan is not laid out from zero degrees and wrapped. Its start angle is computed as straight up MINUS half the sweep, so the fan is always centred on twelve o'clock and grows outward in both directions as the sweep widens. At the full circle this mode ships you cannot tell, because a full circle looks the same wherever it starts. Turn Angular sweep down and the difference is the entire point: the arc stays balanced around the top of the frame instead of hanging off one side of it.

That control is scoped to this mode and one other in the engine, and this mode ships it at 360 degrees. The ray count comes from Symmetry, shipped at 96 and bounded between 24 and 192 inside this branch.

Each ray owns a frequency

A ray does not read the spectrum bin at its own index. It reads the element band for its position in the fan, which places it on a logarithmic curve across the usable spectrum. The difference is not cosmetic: index-based reading crams everything a listener hears as music into the first handful of rays and gives the rest air. On the curve, the fan spreads real content around the whole circle.

A ray's length is its own band plus a floor, plus contributions from the beat pulse and the onset burst, all multiplied by a deformation term that is itself scaled by the band. Its stroke width rises with the same band, so a loud frequency reads as a longer AND thicker spoke. Each ray is stroked with a gradient running from dim at the hub to nearly opaque at the tip, which is what keeps the middle of the picture from turning into a solid disc of overlapping line ends.

The limit is a knee, not a wall

Every tip passes through the engine's soft limiter against the frame's contain radius. That is deliberately not a clamp. A clamp flattens every value above the limit to the same length, which means the loudest passage of the song is precisely where the visual stops responding. The soft knee is the identity well below the limit and only approaches it asymptotically, so louder always reads as longer, forever.

The reserved middle

Rays start at an inner radius derived from whichever is larger of Logo safe zone and Inner radius, itself soft-limited so it can never swallow the frame. The mode then strokes a thin accent ring on that radius. The ring is doing a job: without it, a reserved centre reads as a hole rather than as a frame, and there is nothing to tell you how much room you actually have for a logo, a title or a lyric line.

When to reach for it

Cover art, square social posts, podcast clips, and anything centred on a logo or a face. It is the most legible readout in the engine because there is exactly one layer of information in it. For the same engine with several fans stacked and counter-rotating, read The Mandala Mode; for the same data drawn as a line rather than a fan, The Line Spectrum Mode: The Axis Is Logarithmic Because the Bins Are.

Open Sunburst in the gallery or go straight to the editor.