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Gallery Visual Style

The spec for every example render that ships in the gallery. New examples must conform; deviations are defects. Calibration references: armature-bend, color-attribute-wheel, grease-pencil-rosette, compositor-glare, damped-track-aim, parent-inverse-orrery.

The look in one sentence

A dark staged studio — near-black floor and back wall, one shaped warm key, a warm light pool raking the backdrop — with a saturated hero subject filling the frame.

Color management

  • scene.view_settings.view_transform = 'Standard', always, with a comment. AgX (the 4.x/5.x default) desaturates hero materials toward pastel and lifts the stage toward grey — the washed look of the pre-audit gallery traces to renders that never set a transform.
  • Standard does not compress highlights: tune light energies so nothing clips. If a region reads pure white at full size, the key is too hot.

Stage

  • Floor: 30-unit create_grid plane. Wall: a copy at y ≈ 7–9, rotated 90° about X. Both share one Principled material: Base Color (0.03, 0.032, 0.037), Roughness 0.7.
  • World background: (0.02, 0.021, 0.025).
  • The floor/wall seam is acceptable only where it falls into shadow; never let it cross the subject.

Lighting (all AREA lights)

  • Key — warm white (1.0, 0.96, 0.9), upper left, ~(-4, -5, 6), size 4–6, 300–700 W depending on subject albedo. It must shape: visible falloff across the subject, a readable cast shadow.
  • Fill — cool (0.75, 0.85, 1.0), low right, size ~9, ~100 W. Just enough that shadow sides stay legible; if the image looks flat, the fill is too strong.
  • Rim — cool (0.6, 0.78, 1.0), behind, 200–400 W, to lift silhouettes off the backdrop.
  • Wedge — the signature: warm (1.0, 0.76, 0.5), 200–500 W, size 5–7, raking the back wall so a soft pool of light sits behind the subject. Place it between the subject and the wall. A grazing area light draws a hard terminator line across any flat surface it skims — if a stray bright band crosses the subject, a light is grazing it.

Materials

  • Hero materials are designed, never Principled defaults: saturated base colors, roughness chosen (0.3–0.6 glossy, 0.7+ matte), optional faint emission (~0.1) when the subject carries color data that must read exactly.
  • Surfaces that display flat color data (attribute fills, pixel buffers) go fully matte: Specular IOR Level = 0, otherwise the wall/floor horizon reflects as a line across the face.

Framing

  • The subject fills roughly 70–90 % of the frame in at least one axis. Nothing that matters may touch or cross the frame edge; no featureless quadrant of empty wall or floor.
  • Camera: 45–55 mm lens, slightly above subject height, aimed with a TRACK_TO constraint at an empty on the subject — a chosen angle, not the default. Flat subjects present toward the camera (lean or tilt them); progressions read left to right.
  • The image must still read in under a second at thumbnail scale, and it must witness the API: if the contract failed, the render should visibly break.

Output

  • Render 1280×720 PNG (taa_render_samples/cycles.samples 32–64).
  • Gallery assets: hero webp 1280×720 and preview webp 1200×675, quality 85 (load the PNG in Blender, save(filepath=..., quality=85), scale() for the preview — this preserves pixels without re-applying color management).
  • After touching any example: python scripts/build_gallery.py, and update the README gallery-row alt text if the composition changed.