hall

The banking hall of the Farmers & Merchants Union Bank, Rye County, and the art-glass window in its south wall.

Built to Film.ROOM and Film.WINDOW, in materials chosen so a coloured shape lying on a surface reads as light and never as paint: Kasota cream ashlar, a black-and-ochre mosaic floor, marble, oak, bronze, vault steel and terracotta, none of them saturated. The glass is the only saturated thing in the film.

What is here

• the shell, the coffered ceiling and its ribs and bosses, the cornice and its dentil course
• the engaged piers, and the columns whose capitals the swallows nest in
• the mezzanine deck and its balustrade
• the marble counter, its teller screen, and four bronze wickets whose bars are real geometry because shot 9 is their shadows
• the vault portal, the round door standing open onto the room, and the empty shelves behind it
• the terracotta arch over the vault end
• the west doors and the transom over them
• the chalked demolition numbers
• the window: nine lights across and seven up in a leaded grid, the rosette at (0.50, 0.56), the cobalt band at the head, and one light missing at (col 2, row 7)

Two shaders carry every surface

demo.hall.hall_stone is one world-space surface shader with a pattern switch — ashlar, mosaic, marble, oak, brass, bronze grille, steel, terracotta ornament, plaster. It reads its coordinate off the fragment's world position, so a scaled blockout cube carries square tesserae and level courses whatever size it is, and it hands the engine a PbrSurface so the sun, the sky and the shadows the light slice owns are what light this room.

demo.hall.hall_glass reads each pane's colour and its transmitted brightness off that entity's own instance lanes:

lane 0 = (r, g, b, kind)              kind 0 field · 1 rosette · 2 cobalt · 3 transom
lane 1 = (transmission, seed, 0, milkiness)

so one material serves all sixty-three lights, the rosette and the transom.

What moves

The glass. Each light ignites when the neighbouring roofline clears its own corner — bottom-left to top-right through the morning, which is the sequence shot 4 asks for by name — burns through the afternoon, and dies inside the glass at dusk. The transom over the west doors answers the other half of the sky and is the last glass alight in the film. Both are pure functions of Film.t, so Film.seekTo(t) reproduces either exactly.

Reviewing it

Every entity carries default and also hall, so the room can be taken on its own while the scene several slices share is still being built:

capture { renderLayers = "hall sky" }