Banner lettering (JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE): new Tools/gen/generate_banner_texture.py
draws the exact title with Pillow + Liberation Sans Bold - an image model would
mangle a trademark string, and Qwen-Image 2.1 is research-only. Gold JIMMY /
KIMMEL / LIVE stacked on a crimson ground. ue_hero_facade_import.py generalises
import_albedo to import_texture and wires the banner into M_Facade_Banner_Ref as
Base Color (tiling 1.0), replacing the flat dark tint with a brighter red per the
owner's 'less dark, more bright'.
Re-rendered all three ReviewMap staging shots (front, oblique, portals) and
updated their Screenshots/README.md status rows.
The hero facade rework is now closed at 'surface detail that reads at 45 m'. The
remaining elevation work - volute capital depth, lattice grille depth, and the
full realism pass - is deferred to 0.9.0 per the owner, and the 0.9.0 hero item
records the hand-off.
The motto band and moulded surround had the same burial as the medallions: offset
0.06 left their front face at Y -0.44, inside the 1.2 m-deep parapet, so the
'inset panel with a moulded surround' never rendered. Only the inscription (moved
to 0.40 in the previous commit) read.
- Band recessed at offset 0.34 (Y -0.16), surround proud at 0.43 (Y -0.07),
inscription stays 0.40 (Y -0.10).
- Band is now light stone (was stone_dark): a dark band at the parapet face would
have sat directly behind the dark inscription marks and swallowed them. The
reference is dark incised lettering on a pale band.
- Removed the dead duplicate 'Hero_MottoBand 0.40' entry - the earlier 0.06 match
won, so the 0.40 was silently ignored.
Rendered and judged; the advisory judge no longer flags the band.
The medallions were not just flat - they were buried. seat_on_front put
Hero_Medallion at offset 0.08 (front Y -0.42) while the 1.2 m-deep parapet stands
at Y -0.15, so both discs sat inside the parapet and never rendered. The motto
band and surround have the same burial (offset 0.06) and are a separate follow-up.
- Three stepped layers per medallion with per-layer prefixes so seat_on_front gives
each its own stand-off: Rim (0.55 m, dark, offset 0.36 -> Y -0.14), Field
(0.38 m, light, offset 0.43 -> Y -0.07), Boss (0.15 m, dark, offset 0.50 -> Y 0.00).
A single Hero_Medallion prefix would both flatten the relief and (via startswith)
swallow the specific prefixes, so it is removed.
- Moved from +/-6.2 (inside the inscription text, which spans +/-6.87) to +/-9.8.
- Fixed Tools/review/hero_iterate.sh, which still had the pre-tools-move
'cd dirname/..' and landed in Tools/ instead of the repo root.
Rendered and judged; the advisory two-model judge (no, 0.93) no longer flags the
medallions. Owner review pending.
The reference's most distinctive architectural feature is three lines of incised capitals across the attic.
inscription() lays 112 letter marks in three lines, in the shadow stone so they read as dark incisions at 45 m
rather than disappearing into a same-colour relief - which is exactly what the first attempt did.
Positioning was the lesson: the parapet is 1.2 m deep and stands in FRONT of the wall plane, so marks seated on
FRONT_Y were hidden behind it and rendered invisible. They are now seated on the parapet face (FRONT_Y + 0.40),
which is where the reference puts the lettering too.
Still open in the architectural pass, recorded in TODO.md: medallion relief (the discs are flush and empty),
banner lettering (needs a texture, not geometry), and depth on the capitals and window grilles.
Rows 4-6 re-rendered and pending.
Used the workflow integration from the previous step for real: generated a warm limestone ashlar albedo
with two profiles compared (AlbedoBase 17.04 vs Krea-2 13.90, AlbedoBase won), saved it as
Art/textures/generated/T_FacadeAshlar_AI.png beside its provenance sidecar, and imported it to
/Game/Hollywood/Textures.
ue_hero_facade_import.py now imports that albedo and, for the two stone slots, builds a material with
TextureSampleParameter2D -> Multiply(tint) -> Base Color, tiling the UVs 6x, so the map carries the coursing
and the tint keeps the value inside the reference's range.
Two real bugs fixed on the way:
- the albedo path was resolved against unreal.Paths.project_dir() (Game/GigLine), not the repository root, so
the import silently skipped;
- the authored materials were never saved - only the mesh was - so after a reload the slots pointed at
nothing and the elevation fell back to one default colour.
Honest status: the nodes are verified present and saved (Constant3Vector, TextureSampleParameter2D,
TextureCoordinate, Multiply) and the source mesh has UVs, but the render still shows the flat tint. Recorded
in TODO.md with the next probe: read the compiled Base Color pin instead of the node list.
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md gains the AlbedoBase row (commercial use, credit required).
Iterated the loop five times against Art/reference/hero-masonic/. What took the iterations was the material,
not the geometry:
- M_FacadeStone in /Game/Hollywood/Site is the KIT stone; the hero does not use it, so warming it changed
nothing.
- The hero's materials come from the FBX and live at /Game/Hollywood/ElCapitan/M_Facade_*. Unreal keeps an
existing material asset when an FBX referencing it is re-imported, so a Blender colour change never
arrived.
- Deleting those materials before the import broke the mesh's slots: one colour, no banners, no windows.
The working step is tint_imported_materials(): import normally, then author one plain Constant3Vector
material per facade slot with the colour sampled from the reference, and assign it to the matching slot. The
elevation is now warm sandstone with ashlar coursing, three red banners, two window bands and three recessed
portals with steps.
Also: the portal's solid stone reveal z-fought with the door leaf and read as stripes, so the recess is
carried by jambs, lintel and shadow; banners are 1.35 x 6.2 m hung from 7.2 m instead of 1.55 x 5.4.
Loop iteration 5 verdict is still 'no': it wants the carved inscription, medallion relief, a crimson banner
tone and visible window grilles - all recorded as the next iteration. Rows 4-6 are pending review with the
new captures and two comparison plates.
Tools/hero_iterate.sh runs the whole chain - chmod the Blender files, build, import, render, judge, plate -
and fails loudly at each step with its log under /tmp/gigline. Tools/hero_compare.py builds the side-by-side
plate (reference | rendered, one height, labelled); two are committed for review.
This pass: the stone is warmer in Blender (0.66/0.60/0.48 against the near-white blockout) and the banners are
1.35 x 6.2 m hung from 7.2 m, matching the reference proportion instead of the 1.55 x 5.4 that sat too low and
too fat.
Iteration 1 judge verdict, confidence 0.9: lacks warm sandstone, lacks fluted column detail, banners wrong,
no doorways, no inscription or medallions. Checked against the plate, two of those are wrong (120 flute
strips exist and cast shadows; three 1.2 m deep doorways with steps exist and read black) and three are real.
The split is recorded in TODO.md with the next action for each - the important one being that the stone colour
must change in the UE material (ue_hero_facade_import.py), not in the Blender material, which the render does
not use.
Art/reference/hero-masonic/ (15 images, git-ignored) replaces the single Wikimedia photo as the source of
truth. Two front elevations drive this pass: 02-masonictemple01.jpg, a clean street-level frontal, and
06-el-capitan-theater-frontal-fachade.jpg; 05-hollywoodmasonictemple-1922.jpg records the original masonry.
Changes:
- the blank Hero_Stylobate_LintelBand across the portals is removed - the reference has open doorways with
steps, and they now read as three dark openings with banners above them;
- rustication(): five ashlar courses from the pavement to the portal heads, 4 cm joints proud of the wall;
- balustrade(): bottom rail, top rail and 38 balusters along the roof edge, where the reference shows a
cresting and railing.
Still missing against the same references, and recorded: warm sandstone instead of flat pale stone, lattice
grilles in the window bays, the carved inscription, and medallions that do not read at distance.
The blend is read-only after a checkout - chmod u+w first or the save fails silently and the FBX is never
written, which happened once here.
Rows 4-6 re-rendered and pending review.
The three hero captures showed a plain block with six columns because every applied detail sat BEHIND the
wall's front face, inside the solid mass:
Hero_Banner_1 y -1.08..-1.02 (55 cm inside)
Hero_Portal_1 y -2.35..-1.15 (2 m inside)
Hero_Window_1_1 y -0.60..-0.52 (2 cm inside)
The colonnade, cornice and dentils happened to protrude, which is exactly what the shots showed.
The depth is now stated once, in hero_facade_build.py: FRONT_Y is the wall's front face and
seat_on_front() moves every applied part until its street-facing face sits at FRONT_Y + offset - 8 cm for
banners and jambs, 5 cm for entablature and cornice, 3 cm for window panes, 4 cm for mullions, 10 cm for
portal signs. It reports what it moved, 99 parts.
After re-export, re-import and re-render the front elevation now shows the three red banners, the two
window bands, the dentil course and the portals. What is still missing against the reference: rusticated
banding on the stone, lettering on the motto band, grilles in the windows, a balustrade on the parapet, and
the blank lintel band across the portals that the reference does not have.
Rows 4, 5 and 6 are back to pending for review because the images changed.
The portal detail shot failed for a modelling reason, not a camera reason: the
doors were 0.1 m panels on a solid plinth, so they read as shading. The plinth is
now four piers plus a lintel band, with a 1.2 m reveal, stone jambs and lintels
standing 0.10 m proud and three mullions per opening. review-06 frames them from
8 m at eye height.
Two defects fixed while doing it: the jamb boxes hung 0.15 m below the pavement,
so the facade imported with min Z -15 cm; and a rebuild run against a read-only
.blend silently skipped the save, which is why screenshots kept showing the old
geometry.
Geo/tools/ is now every geographic script, with Geo/README.md documenting each
one; the Blender-side builders moved beside their outputs in Art/blender/*/ and
import their helpers from Geo/tools/osm_common.py.
That module gains to_unreal_local() and to_blender_local(): the only place in the
repository that multiplies metres by 100, so a second silent scale cannot be
introduced. block_height_report.py adds height provenance for the block — 3 of
15 buildings have no height data and render at a placeholder 6.4 m.
asset_metadata.py writes and audits <asset>.geo.json sidecars; four now exist
(hero-facade, terrain, street, blockout) and the audit recomputes each centre from
the origin, failing anything that disagrees.
Tools/hero_facade_build.py builds the north elevation parametrically and writes
a JSON report naming the evidence behind every part: the 25.75 m frontage and
14.5 m height are measured, the 4.96 m column bay comes from the sibling notes
and matches that frontage, the three portal flights follow the photographs (five
risers, overturning the inherited eight-step, 12 m wide claim), and the rest is
labelled assumption.
Tools/ue_hero_facade_import.py imports it with the ue_metric_v1 preset
(2604 x 1257 x 1450 cm, 1892 tris, 4 materials) and places it on the measured
building line of /Game/Hollywood/DemoMap.
Two new review shots at review-04 and review-05, both pending approval. Camera
placement cost four renders: the first two sat inside the facade body, and the
frontage faces Unreal -Y, so a camera has to stand at Y < -1450 cm, not north of
the building line in project terms.
zwitschi