Ribbons v3 — Caterpillar circle

A plump, segmented body arcs around an oval track over a faint drifting grid, spectrum sliding along its flesh. The middle of the creature is fat and glossy, both ends taper to points, and the bulges seem to crawl along it as it circles.

The body is a train of stamped discs along an elliptical orbit; their radius is read from a short repeating cycle of preset values rather than a smooth function, which is what pinches the flesh into segments. A circular weight map fattens the middle and sharpens the tips, and the crawl is the cycle index sliding along the body over time.