freshcut: the mansion as a PBR palace, glazed and lit
Carries the palace rework that had been sitting uncommitted in the working
tree since 2026-07-25 -- the hollow vertex-coloured house becomes a Palladian
palace on builtin PBR, authored one builder per material class (stone, marble,
oak, gilt, glass, fabric, mirror, glow) with a domed double-height hall, a
gallery on an imperial staircase, colonnaded links and two end pavilions --
together with the fixes below.
The gallery walk was one solid oak box with parquet over its top, so the face
the hall sees from below was raw dark timber: a black band across every stair
shot. All three runs now carry a plaster soffit and a moulded fascia along the
open edge. The slab itself stays oak, because the parquet slats are inset and
a pale slab would show through the floor above.
Glazing no longer blocks the sun. A pane inherits castsShadows, so every window
was a light blocker and the house was lit by its own lamps alone; glass is the
one class that now spawns without it. The panes are also transparent for the
first time -- alpha alone does nothing while a material is opaque, so the class
carries alpha blending and specular transmission, and the sashes read through
to the sky.
The interior daylight was blue enough to read as moonlight and pull the
limestone grey. It is close to neutral now, the hall carries about seventy per
cent more light, a low bounce keeps the chequer floor and the plinths from
falling away to black, and each principal room has a daylight fill so it reads
as a lit room through its archway.
Materials differentiate: marble tightens under a waxed clearcoat, oak gains a
varnish lobe, stone softens, fabric flattens. Gilt stays deliberately broad --
a tighter lobe returns more of the single environment probe, which holds a dim
room, and the torchères go black.
The imperial stair landed forward of the dome: its foot sat at -26.6 against a
hall centre of -27.5, so the ball hung over the treads and the marble compass
inlaid at the centre was buried under the flight. The foot moves back to -29.0
and the run comes out of the half-landing, which clears the centre and puts the
flight on roughly thirty degrees.