# Open work on Tera

Short, and only things that are decided but not done. Anything speculative belongs
in an issue, not here.

## Re-shoot the time-lapse films

The 18 product stills and both share cards were re-shot on 2026-08-22 at `2b2dd5c`
and are live. **The films were not.** `films.ts` in lumbridge-v4 records the tera
commit each reel was shot at, so a stale reel is visually stale and no caption edit
fixes it — check that commit against tera HEAD before assuming a reel is current.

What the reels predate: ACES tone mapping and the runtime PMREM environment rig; a
sea that reflects, with a swell normal map, Fresnel and sun glitter, in place of a
flat `MeshLambertMaterial` that had no specular term at all; a world-space sky dome
replacing the screen-space gradient, which at dusk painted the sunset band along the
*bottom* of the picture, under the board; terrain that casts shadows; a California
board with the Basin and Range, Death Valley, the Salton Sea and San Diego on it;
aircraft you can actually see; a rebuilt LA studio; the studio device hardware; and
a new UI chrome with a first-run flow.

```sh
npm run build
node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs --frames 24   # rough cut first: ~20 s, and it is
                                                  # the cheapest way to find out a
                                                  # camera is pointed at the wrong thing
node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs               # ~90 s per 180-frame film on the Radeon
```

Worth knowing before starting (the rest is in `~/.claude/skills/tera-capture`):

- Check the run prints the Radeon and not SwiftShader. The software path is ~15x
  slower — 22 minutes a film rather than 90 seconds — and it reports success.
- `hero-soma` is a different animal: `chrome: "bare"`, midnight to midnight, and a
  two-stage encode (a CRF 18 master, then 1440w CRF 28 and 960w CRF 30 delivered).
- **The hero camera is worth reconsidering.** Whole-board was tried and rejected
  because the edge of the terrain plate showed against the sky. That seam no longer
  exists: the sea now runs eighteen board spans and ends past the fog's far plane.
- After tuning the hero, run `npm run check:hero` in lumbridge-v4.
- `#onboarding-host` is in `FURNITURE.CLUTTER` now. Every *new* overlay has to be
  added there too, because a frame with a stray card in it still renders and still
  looks deliberate.
- Commit tera first, then re-run, so the manifest records a clean sha.