Teaching the bench new parts

The Catalog shows the parts the lake already has. The Workshop is where new ones get made, and it's built around a simple idea: whatever image tool I use, the result should come back in the scene's own format, ready to move.

Step 1: the prompt

It works in steps. Step 1 is a prompt builder. Pick the kind of part (13 of them, from four-legged animals to shoreline pieces), a style, and whether you want one piece or a kit sheet of separate parts. It writes a prompt that asks for flat colours on plain white, so the result traces cleanly. Then generate it anywhere.

Step 2: the way back in

Step 2 brings the picture back. The tracer used to be a Python script on my laptop. Now it runs in the browser: it reduces the image to a few colours, cleans up the specks, and simplifies every outline. The doe traces to 7 colours in under a second. The fox in the clip came out as 5 colours and 5 paths, 7 KB, in 693 milliseconds. Then it sits next to an animal from the lake, so you can see straight away whether it belongs.

A useful failure

The kit-sheet option came from a failure. I traced a beach scene as one picture and got a mess, because a scene isn't one shape. Asking for separate pieces on one sheet fixed it.

Step 3, cut and rig, is next: splitting a traced animal at the joints so it can move like the others.

I traced a beach scene as one picture and got a mess, because a scene isn't one shape.

The bench itself

The header is the bench itself. A hologram above it cycles through animals that don't exist yet: an eagle, an owl, a hawk, a squirrel. On glowing discs stand the buck, doe, elk and bear from the live engine, and Marley sleeps at the end of the bench. I took out a soldering iron that didn't belong and fixed my hair colour, which the first render got wrong.

What I learned: make the way back in the easy part. Generating a picture takes seconds anywhere. Turning it into something the scene can use is the work, so that's what the Workshop does.