The pelican test · Claude Opus 5.5 (Max)

A white pelican with an orange bill and pouch pedals a teal bicycle along a seaside promenade, black wing feathers wrapped around the handlebar.

Dashed orange: steering axis (72°) and seat tube (73°) against the ground. Dots: hip, knee and ankle from the two-bone IK solve, thigh 85, shin 105.

Prompt

Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

This is Simon Willison's informal benchmark. The model has to write the SVG markup itself, with no image generator in the loop.

The still is hand-written path data. The animated cut reuses it and adds SMIL motion, with the leg keyframes solved by inverse kinematics so the feet never leave the pedals.

Bicycle: Diamond frame with a 73° seat tube and 72° head tube, 310-unit wheelbase, single speed with a 22:11 chainring and cog, so the wheels turn exactly twice per crank turn.
Rider: An American white pelican: black primaries wrapped around the grips, webbed feet on the pedals, a fish visible through the pouch.
Motion: Crank 1.8 s per turn, wheels 0.9 s, road dashes scroll at the tyre's rolling speed. Every animation divides 7.2 s, so the whole scene loops without a seam.
Files: Still SVG 16 KB (4.5 KB gzipped), 138 shapes, no embedded bitmaps. Animated SVG 34 KB.