Project-M/Docs/Vault/01_Vision/Art_Direction_Lantern.md

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tags	status	updated	permalink
vision art-direction lantern style-bible workstream-a	draft-binding	2026-07-13	gamevault/01-vision/art-direction-lantern

LANTERN — Art Direction Lock (Workstream A0)

The binding one-page style bible for Roadmap_Lantern_Slice's art track (Workstream A0, runs inside Phase 0). Adopted under DR-048_Lantern_Adoption_Full_Pivot. This is the written half of A0; the gate is the in-engine style-proof scene (below), which is not yet built — Phase 0 does not exit until it is approved. The readability law is lifted verbatim from [[Identity_Lantern#Art, audio & the readability law|the identity]] and applies to every asset from day one.

Why this matters more than usual: one developer, learning Blender, shipping custom creatures. This direction lives or dies on a repeatable factory, not on any single beautiful asset. Every rule here is chosen so that creature N+1 is a routine sitting, not a research project.

Style bible (binding)

• Stylized low-poly, RoR2-lineage. Silhouette-first; faceted geometry; flat / near-flat shading. Mood is carried by dynamic light in murk, never by texture detail. A readable blob with a great light beats a detailed model nobody can see in the dark.
• Poly budgets (hard): props ≤ ~800 tris · creatures ≤ ~3k · hero / boss / suit-frames ≤ ~6k.
• The palette is the ontology (the fiction rule made visible): warm gold/amber = light (ours, true) · cold corpse-green/blue = gloam (the deep's counterfeit) · lure-red = bait · white-hot = conversion.
• The readability law (binding, from the three reviews):
  1. Value first, hue second. Every warm/cold distinction is also carried by luminance value, shape language, and flicker-cadence (steady = true, flicker = false — the load-bearing channel; hue is the garnish). This is the colorblind answer (gold-vs-green is a worst-case red-green pair).
  2. Design the dark floor for the video encoder, not the OLED. Bioluminescent ground-clutter density is the streamability dial; dark scenes must survive 6–8 Mbps without macroblocking. A separate capture / photo grade (lifted, saturated profile) ships for clips and screenshots.
  3. Screenshot discipline. Every promotional frame reads at 200 px with a warm focal light AND a legible silhouette.

The material decision (the solo-dev keystone)

No per-asset texturing, ever. This is the single most important production rule in the project.

• One shared palette / gradient atlas — Imphenzia-style: a single small texture of colour bands. UVs are placed onto bands, not unwrapped. Zero texture-painting skill required; perfect style coherence; batches hard.
• Vertex-colour accents for per-asset variation on top of the atlas.
• Three master shaders — the whole rendering surface of the game:
  1. Lit-Palette — statics (props, dressing, environment, station).
  2. Emissive-Gloam — parameterized warm/cold/lure emissive. One shader is the entire palette rule: its parameters (hue, flicker-cadence, intensity) are both the look and gameplay information (true-vs-false light). Every glow in the game is this shader.
  3. Skinned-Palette — deformation-aware (the Rukhanka-skinned creatures/suits). Replaces the current AnimatedLitShader role as the palette-atlas creature material.

Every asset in the game shares ~3 materials. Coherence, batching, and no per-asset UV/texture work — that is the amortization that makes a one-person creature factory possible.

⚠ Carry-over gotcha (material-property-body-flash-rukhanka): a per-instance URPMaterialPropertyBaseColor tint only renders if the shader declares _BaseColor Hybrid-Per-Instance (ShaderGraph overrideHLSLDeclaration:true + hlslDeclarationOverride:2). The three master shaders must be authored Hybrid-Per-Instance if we want per-instance gloam-tint variants (a free variant axis — see A2 variant policy).

Reference board

• RoR2 — shape language, faceted low-poly, dynamic-light-first in dark ambient.
• Dredge — water mood, dread, the sea-as-atmosphere.
• Hollow Knight — value control in darkness (how to stay legible with almost no light).
• Below — the cautionary case: solo dread + screenshot-illegible darkness killed it. The readability law exists specifically against this failure.

The style-proof scene — THE GATE (not yet built)

One prop + one creature + one suit, in-engine, under murk + dynamic lights, on the capture grade. Judged three ways, all of which must pass:

1. Full-size — reads as this game and no other.
2. At 200 px — silhouette + warm focal light legible (screenshot-discipline rule).
3. In grayscale — value-first / flicker-cadence carries the true-vs-false read with hue removed.

Locked before any mass production. This gate + DR-048_Lantern_Adoption_Full_Pivot + the world-model review (Lantern_World_Model_Spike) together are Phase 0's exit. Until this scene is approved, Workstream A stays in A0 (no A1 pipeline proof, no A2 factory).

Handoff to the deeper pass (A1 recipes)

The concrete recipe documents are A1 work (Phase 1), not A0: the statics recipe (Blender → export units/scale → collider policy → entity baking → palette material) and the skinned recipe (rig → per-action clips, Key All Bones, bake-to-pose → FBX → Rukhanka ingest → Skinned-Palette → prefab). Both build on the project's proven animation pipeline (DR-022_Animation_Pipeline_Rukhanka_Synty / DR-023_Enemy_Animation_MonsterMash

• the machine-local Blender recipe) and the three rig families (Drifter / Crawler / Strider). This doc is the constitution; the recipes are the operating manuals.

Related

• Identity_Lantern — the fiction the palette encodes (the readability law lives there too)
• Roadmap_Lantern_Slice — Workstream A (A0 → A1 → A2 → A3) gates
• DR-048_Lantern_Adoption_Full_Pivot — the adoption
• Synty_Asset_Inventory — placeholder quarry until custom assets land
• DR-022_Animation_Pipeline_Rukhanka_Synty — the skinned-material lineage Skinned-Palette inherits