127 sprites had been generated and about eight had ever been looked at. The
pipeline will happily render the wrong object, confidently and well-lit, and no
assertion can tell — barrier and flightCase are both "a grey box with edges" as
far as any test goes. tools/gen/contact_sheet.py puts every shipped sprite on one
page at integer upscale on the venue's own floor colour. It immediately showed
about twenty props reading as pale blobs.
First instinct was that the vertex baker had lost the albedo. That was wrong:
sat=0 on ashUrn, marbleSink and pillar is honest, because stainless and marble
and concrete really are grey. The fault was BRIGHTNESS. Props that read sit at
median luminance 23-123 (patioHeater 23, arcade 45, poolTable 53, cdj 68); the
blobs were 150-190. The venue is painted at ~35 under a 50% black sheet and props
are lit by the room's own LIGHTS, so a prop arriving at 180 doesn't read as a
bright object — it reads as self-illuminated. Every prop that worked before
worked by accident of subject matter; the first pale subjects exposed the gap.
props_import --dim scales RGB until median opaque luminance is <=110. Only ever
darkens, so anything already in band passes through untouched. Fixed 48 sprites
with no regeneration at all — the 512px Blender renders were still in
art_incoming, which is exactly why that directory is kept.
Also: poster7 shipped with 29% of its pixels and poster9 with 42%, because the
near-black-to-alpha pass was eating the dark half of a dark poster. Posters are
rectangular plates on a wall, so 4-9 now keep their background and fill the frame.
And cf_flux --probe was reporting EXHAUSTED on an account with a full 10,000
neurons: the probe prompt was "a grey square", Cloudflare's safety filter refused
it as NSFW, and every non-429 fell through to SystemExit. A health check that
can't tell "refused" from "empty" will eventually call a healthy system dead.
Gate: lint clean, build clean, 821 tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
37 generated props -> 86. Every one of the 76 prop kinds placed across the four
venues has a sprite; nothing renders as a placeholder.
tools/gen/ is the pipeline: assets.py is the manifest (one entry per sprite —
prompt, ship size, rake, route), run_batch.py walks it, resumable, --workers N.
Cloudflare Workers AI first for its 10k free daily neurons, falling back to
MODELBEAST flux_local automatically. Today's allocation was already spent when
the run started — confirmed from Cloudflare's own error body rather than assumed
— so this batch is entirely farm-rendered.
The mesh tier is the part worth keeping: TRELLIS's defaults (1024_cascade + a
2048px metal PBR bake) cost 5-12 minutes each on a queue that runs one gpu job
at a time, which is four hours for a tileset. mb.FAST_MESH (512 + vertex baker)
lands in ~90s, and A/B'd at ship size the difference does not survive the
downscale to 32px.
Also adds the door's per-venue street plates, keyed on the venue id exactly —
'theRoyal', not a case fold, because props_import writes ':' as '_' and a
lowercased key looks for a plate nobody made.
Gate: lint clean, build clean, 821 tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
