Canyon museum lighting — the NatGeo art direction (skin relight + river protagonist)

[AdaWorldAPI]

"Stop thinking like a GIS, start thinking like a landscape photographer. … Don't optimize against Google Maps. Optimize against National Geographic." — the operator's art-direction brief

The remaining work wasn't more geometry — it was art direction. This round replaces the ver-9 skin's flat orbit-light (0.80 + 0.32·ndl) with museum lighting, and makes the Colorado the protagonist.

Shader (GeoHelix VERT, uSkin branch)

• Museum light — warm morning key (wrap diffuse), weak cool sky fill, and a warm umber shadow floor (0.46,0.33,0.26 — reddish-black, never grey). The canyon glows in its own bounce light.
• Terrain first, imagery second — partial de-light: the photo's baked-in orbital luma is pulled 50% toward a mid reference (gain clamped [0.7,1.9] so dark pine stays deep, not lime) and our key re-shades the surfel form; the satellite palette remains as tint.
• Colour separation — hue-preserving chroma ×1.20: cream limestone / ochre / orange sandstone / deep red strata split without cartooning.
• Warm atmospheric perspective — distance lifts toward pale warm amber, never grey fog. Arizona's dry air; distant mesas stay readable.
• The river is the only material with dynamic lighting — aWet from the Garmin KIND grid; deep blue-green channel; riparian fringe at the Gouraud-feathered banks; two view-dependent Blinn lobes (pow 80 sun-path + pow 420 sparkle) that slide along the bends as the camera orbits. Sandstone stays matte — a few moving glints read as living water, no animation needed.

Bake (garmin_bake.rs)

• --crop KIND registration fix — the kind grid was rasterized against the full-tile bbox on a cropped grid (misregistered; invisible while the skin covered it). A deg→mu kbbox from the crop window now feeds kind_grid/river_fill_grid.
• Connected-component river filter (≥25 cells) before the ×2 widening — Garmin's 0x4c class also stamps hundreds of 1–4-cell flecks across the plateau; at altitude the region must read dry, so only the Colorado ribbon gets the river material (flecks fall through to the still-water subtle class: 21k cells demoted at full res).

Asset

Canyon rebaked from the hue-preserving-brightened demgrid (operator: colour "a little on the dark side" — satellite haze + atmospheric degradation vs the eye's idealized diffuse morning light): global luma p2→p98 stretch to [12,242] (NOT per-channel — that would grey the red rock), gamma 0.94 shadow-open, sat ×1.12, warm bias. Luma mean 108→139, red-rock ratio kept (R155>G140>B89). 38.6 MB gz.

Verification

• Three headless iterations on a 643k proxy: strata separation ✓, warm umber shadows ✓, dry plateau (confetti eliminated across two root-cause fixes) ✓, deep pine forest ✓, river meanders in blue-green ✓. Glint motion is view-dependent — best seen live on the deploy by orbiting.
• cargo build --release -p geo-hhtl ✓ · npx tsc --noEmit ✓ · npm run build ✓

Follow-ups

• River continuity: 0x4c river-fill rasterizes the thin inner-gorge reaches sub-cell (dashed); width-stamped polyline rasterization would give continuous material coverage.
• Release-hosted assets (session cannot create Releases — proxy-blocked; needs an operator-created release, then I wire the Dockerfile pull + git rm the blobs).
• Same relight applies to Havel/Iceland skins automatically (shared shader) — Havel gets its glints once a water mask lands (no Garmin KIND there; imagery-based detection is the follow-up).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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Generated by Claude Code

Summary by CodeRabbit

• New Features

  • Introduced a museum-inspired lighting treatment for satellite terrain, with warmer atmosphere, enhanced geological depth, and improved relief presentation.
  • Added dynamic river lighting with water highlights, bank blending, and view-dependent sparkle.
  • Improved river and lake rendering by filtering isolated water artifacts and preserving broader river channels.

• Bug Fixes

  • Corrected river, lake, and forest alignment when generating cropped terrain views.

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[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 7b9ac40f-4ab6-4cba-a74b-5b91fcf68516

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 343d2f0 and 9609e37.

⛔ Files ignored due to path filters (1)

• cockpit/public/canyon.v8grid.soa.gz is excluded by !**/*.gz

📒 Files selected for processing (3)

• claude-notes/plans/2026-07-10-garmin-dem-satellite-skin.md
• cockpit/src/GeoHelix.tsx
• geo/src/bin/garmin_bake.rs

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The change adds crop-aware Garmin KIND rasterization, filters arid river components before dilation, derives per-vertex wet masks in decodeGrid, and applies river-specific ver-9 terrain shader lighting through the new aWet attribute.

Changes

Ver-9 river material pipeline

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Crop-aware Garmin river rasterization geo/src/bin/garmin_bake.rs	KIND overlays use crop-adjusted bounds, and arid river dilation now operates only on connected components containing at least 25 cells.
Wet vertex mask decoding cockpit/src/GeoHelix.tsx	decodeGrid derives and morphologically cleans per-vertex water flags, returning them through the optional wets buffer.
River-specific terrain lighting cockpit/src/GeoHelix.tsx, claude-notes/plans/...	The ver-9 shader uses aWet for channel, bank, tint, and view-dependent highlight effects; geometry binds wet data or a zero fallback, and the lighting plan documents the associated direction.

Estimated code review effort: 4 (Complex) | ~45 minutes

Possibly related PRs

• AdaWorldAPI/q2#96: Both modify water-related vertex shader lighting in GeoHelix.tsx.
• AdaWorldAPI/q2#97: Both update arid Garmin river handling and related shader behavior.
• AdaWorldAPI/q2#98: Both extend Garmin river/lake handling across baking and cockpit rendering.

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant garmin_bake
  participant decodeGrid
  participant Terrain vertex shader
  garmin_bake->>decodeGrid: crop-aligned KIND and filtered river data
  decodeGrid->>decodeGrid: derive and clean wets mask
  decodeGrid->>Terrain vertex shader: bind aWet vertex attribute
  Terrain vertex shader->>Terrain vertex shader: compute river and bank lighting

Loading

Poem

I hop through wet masks, bright and spry,
Where river glints beneath the sky.
Cropped grids align, stray flecks depart,
Warm museum light gives maps their art.
— A pleased little rabbit 🐇

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title accurately captures the main change: canyon museum-style relighting with the river as the visual focus.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

✨ Finishing Touches

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• Create stacked PR
• Commit on current branch

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