place

The archipelago of Pastel Astral Dream: seven confection islands over a sea of poured cream, in their act I state — hard, matte, dry, dusted with sugar frost, and mirroring. Geometry, materials, the sea and everything that lives on the islands.

Serves shots 1 (the frost macro), 2 (the establishing wide), 3 (the skim and its bow wave), 4 (the cliff crane and its crack), 8 (under the cream) and 12 (the drained shallows).

Exports

• M.build() — creates every entity. Idempotent; guarded on pad_place_root being alive. Sets M.anchors whether or not it goes on to build, so the camera slice can ask for a station regardless of who ran first.
• M.rebuild() — tears the whole slice down (ocean included) and builds it again.
• M.attach(film) — registers the "place" animator.
• M.setSeaLevel(y) — moves the cream surface, its bed and the sprinkles riding it. melt may call this; this slice already drives it off film.seaDrop(t), and the two agree because they read the same number.
• M.anchors.frostRidge / M.anchors.crack — exact world points, walked off the islands' own surfaces, for the camera slice to stand at.
• M.geom / M.mats / M.isles / M.sea / M.props — the submodules.

What is here, and what moves

Everything that moves here is a pure function of film time t: the sea falls as film.seaDrop(t) says, the floating sprinkles bob and turn on it, a bow wave sheds from the skim camera at fixed film times and runs out across the mirror, the frost fibres shiver (hardest as a grain of sugar-snow goes past, twice in shot 1), the crack runs up the glaze between t 22.6 and 28.6, and the cream's own emission ramps with film.uplight(t). Applying the same t twice leaves the world bit-identical — measured: two captures of the frost macro at t = 1.90 differ by 0.0.

What other slices drive on this

• melt — sags pad_place_mesa, and ramps gloss/wetness by writing roughness, clearcoat and subsurface_radius on the materials mats.NAMES lists. Use mats.ref("marshmallow") etc. rather than typing the identity.
• look — every light, the grade, the exposure. This slice adds none. It DOES capture the sky into the environment's sky slot (environment.captureSky + ensureSkyFallback), because a reflective surface no probe covers reflects black and the sea is the largest reflective surface in the film.
• camera — frames pad_place_frost_ridge for shot 1 and pad_place_crack for shot 4; M.anchors carries both as exact world points.

Notes

• Geometry is procedural and RUNTIME — renderer.mesh.create, no mesh assets — so build() re-makes it on every scene load and there is nothing to keep in sync. Every wobble comes from geom.noise2, which is a pure function of its arguments, so the archipelago is identical on every build.
• geom.island is the one primitive every land mass is made of: a closed surface of revolution over a footprint that need not be a circle, with a Catmull-Rom vertical profile, a radius wobble and an optional world-space warp.
• The materials all bind @builtin::shaders.pbr, which carries subsurface, sheen, transmission and clearcoat on one shader — marshmallow reads as translucent matter through subsurface_color + thickness, and the sugar frost is the sheen lobe.
• absorptionColor on the ocean is an extinction coefficient, not a tint. The brighter a channel is, the more of it the body of the liquid eats. A cream sea wants a very dark absorption; the preset values (#322c29) are already dark for that reason and a "cream-coloured" one renders black.
• ocean:configure() reports values it does not apply. The config table comes back holding the new colours while the surface keeps rendering the old ones (#11266). Everything this slice sets goes through Ocean.attach on a freshly spawned entity, which is why rebuild() tears the ocean down by name first.
• A material write fans out to an onAssetReload callback on every script component holding that material. Writing unchanged values across twenty materials put this engine into a watchdog cascade that ended in SIGILL (#10525), so mats.ensure writes only what differs and the cream's emission ramp is quantised to 32 steps.