Concept note · the lab vocabulary
Volume
Treating what is on screen as matter with height and depth — not a picture that fakes them.
What it is
The commitment to store and render a thing as the volume it is, rather than as a flat image with tricks painted on to suggest depth. A bump map is a picture of texture; a height field is texture. A normal map suggests a ridge; a signed-distance primitive is one, and can be stacked on, cut through, lit from any angle and looked at from the side. The difference is invisible until you tip the view or move the lamp — and then it is the only thing that matters.
In the lab
- Volume Painter →
- Paint as capsules with a finite load; height, albedo and wetness baked from them; a two-finger twist that ray-marches the real height field to show the stack.
- Holographic TV →
- A scene as a real image in the air — voxels of light relayed by two parabolas — so a viewer is handed the rays themselves, and the trace that shows depth magnifying as the square is the honest cost of volume.
Our position
Volume has to be the truth, not the display. Keep the analytical primitives as the source of record and bake the pictures from them; never let the picture become the data. Then prove it the honest way: change the viewpoint or the light and see whether the world holds. A white bead over a crimson bead should read as a stack because it is one, and a shadow should lengthen because the lamp moved, not because someone drew a longer shadow.
Honest limitations
Volume costs. Every stroke is a primitive that must be baked, and the naive path — evaluating every capsule per pixel per frame — does not run at interactive rates, so the engine lives on incremental stamps, capped textures and idle pauses. The infinite polyhedral canvas, the viscosity blend, colour shear and glazing are specified, not built. And a height field is a two-and-a-half-dimensional truth: it can hold a stack but not an overhang, which is the boundary this approach has chosen, not a law.
The experiments are the proof
Every claim in this note is made concrete somewhere in the lab — the idea exists because the machines needed it.
The map of the lab →