The default studio environment's level-preserving mean of 1 acted like a
100% white Ambient light: with only the Environment light on, a white floor
rendered at full white (95% of the frame saturated) while its shadow core
went to pitch black — a fog over the scene, nothing like After Effects'
default. Three changes bring the look in line, CPU and GPU alike:
- The default environment is a dim studio now: a solid-angle-weighted mean
of 0.3 (and a stronger key gradient), so a white floor reads a mid gray
and the light's colour x intensity still scales the level.
- The shadow occludes only the image's directional (key) fraction of the
light — |sum of dir x radiance| / sum of radiance, computed beside the
dominant direction and carried in the scene — so the fill keeps shining
inside the shadow: an area-light shadow, partial like After Effects'
(a lone bright spot on black still shadows almost fully; a uniform image
not at all).
- The environment shadow map's penumbra has a floor — eight output pixels,
or four map texels where those are coarser — because the map covers the
whole scene bounding sphere rather than the view, and its texels would
otherwise stair-step the edge (all the more in a draft render's flat 512
budget). Shadow Diffusion widens it further, as before.
Tests: the key fraction tracks directionality; the default keeps its dim
level, its direction and its key; the default and a bright key both shadow
the floor (the default partial, the key deep) with Cast Shadows off lit
everywhere; and the full look — a mid-gray lit floor (no fog), a partial
core, and a soft edge ramp in quality and draft renders alike.
After Effects' default environment map casts shadows out of the box: an
Environment light with Cast Shadows on shadows the scene with no Source
set. The flat default cancelled its dominant direction to zero, so the
option did nothing until a Source image arrived. Give the default a soft
studio gradient (bright above and toward the initial camera, dark below
and behind), level-normalised so the light's colour x intensity still
sets the overall brightness; its dominant region drives the existing
shadow pipeline, CPU and GPU alike.
Three small fixes from the review of the shadow commit:
- light_settings switched a Classic 3D comp to Advanced 3D whenever the
edited light was an Environment light (the resulting kind), so editing
the intensity of one in a comp the user had switched back to Classic 3D
dragged the renderer back. The switch now happens only on the
non-Environment to Environment transition (the sources before and
after), matching the docs; ordinary edits leave the renderer to the
user.
- dominant_direction's thresholds let NaN through (every NaN comparison
is false): a NaN or infinite texel produced a NaN sun direction and
NaN shading with it. A non-finite weight or length now returns no
direction — garbage casts no shadow.
- add_environment walked the full-resolution image for the dominant
direction even when the light casts no shadows, where nothing reads
it. Only a shadow-casting light pays for the pass now.
Tests: editing an existing Environment light in a Classic 3D comp keeps
the renderer and stays toast-silent; a NaN and an infinite environment
image yield no sun direction.
The Casts Shadows option Environment lights got is only half a fix if
nothing shades for it: an image lights the scene from every direction,
and what occludes that light is the image itself — its dominant bright
region, the sun in a sky map.
- dominant_direction finds it: the radiance-weighted mean texel
direction (solid-angle weighted, rotation applied). A uniform image
cancels to zero — a flat default environment shines from everywhere
at once and casts no shadow, which a uniform environment test pins.
- The shadow is one orthographic map over the scene from that
direction, after the lights' maps, like a parallel light's: PCF
widened by Shadow Diffusion, darkened by Shadow Darkness, cleared
when nothing casts, the image is directionless, or the texel budget
drops it.
- It darkens the environment's own diffuse and specular light on
Accepts Shadows surfaces and counts in Cast Shadows Only. CPU and
GPU (WGSL) do the same; Globals carries the environment's sun
direction and shadow settings (40 → 44 floats, preflight updated).
A bright-disc environment turned to shine from behind the camera now
shadows a sphere onto the floor behind it, Cast Shadows off lights it
evenly again, and the GPU scene's sky gradient takes a shadow-casting
Environment light. Also: the renderer-switch toasts read "...renderer,
which draws 3D models", the dialog's Casts Shadows checkbox gets an
auto id (dialog.light.casts) the tests click, and the docs' Environment
notes cover the shadow.
An Environment light had no visible effect, and its Light Settings dialog had
no Casts Shadows option — both halves of #2436.
No effect had two causes:
- Classic 3D (the default for new comps) skips Environment lights entirely,
so creating one did nothing. Adding one (or changing a light's type to it)
now switches the comp to Advanced 3D in the same undo step, with a toast,
exactly as model and primitive layers already do; switching back to
Classic 3D with an Environment light in the comp explains itself too.
- In Advanced 3D, a light with no Source and no Environment Layer produced no
environment at all. It now falls back to a flat default environment of the
light's colour × intensity, as After Effects does, so the light always
lights the scene per its parameters.
Cast Shadows was missing because the dialog and the light's property groups
shared one gate (Falloff and Shadows together) that excluded Environment.
The two are now split: every light but Ambient gets Casts Shadows, Shadow
Darkness and Shadow Diffusion (stored, edited and carried over on type
changes), while Falloff stays on Parallel/Spot/Point only — an environment
light shines from every direction at once and has no use for a falloff.
Tests: the renderer lights a card from a sourceless Environment light (colour
and intensity drive it, zero intensity lights nothing), the engine switches
Classic comps to Advanced 3D on creation and type change (one undo step,
toast, and the Classic 3D switch-back toast), Environment lights take and
carry shadow options but no Falloff, and the dialog ticks Casts Shadows on
a new Environment light.
Poison recovery, OsStr::to_str and char predicates only; S4325 casts are
f64 to f32 and stay.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Shadow maps use the full scene-derived size (point-light faces capped
at 2048) under a 26M-texel scene budget halved largest-first; the PCF
filter measures its reach in output pixels with a two-texel minimum,
samples texel centres on a jittered adaptive 5..10 grid, and compares
each texel against the receiver plane's own depth so wide kernels never
self-shadow lit casters. The WGSL mirror is parenthesised (Tint rejects
the old form) and guarded by a shader-wide grammar test; the CPU
reference and shader remain step-for-step parity-tested.
On an adjustment layer Motion Tile kept the comp-sized buffer whatever the
Output Width / Height, and the adjustment draw dropped any stack result whose
size differed from the canvas. After Effects grows (or crops) the comp
rectangle there as on any layer, so a Transform after it brings the extra
tiles into view, as in the frames attached to #1727 and #1409.
- motion_tile_frame: one output frame for the CPU and GPU effect; on an
adjustment it grows about the comp rectangle on whole pixels, keeps the
buffer at 100 % and past 16 384 pixels a side.
- adjustment_crop: the CPU and GPU adjustment draws put a stack result whose
frame changed back onto the canvas instead of dropping it (Enc::crop on
the GPU).
Tests: the #1727 After Effects frames (910 x 340 % and 90 x 340 % then
Scale 12 %), tiles past the frame and cropping on CPU, GPU vs CPU for
adjustment and full-frame layers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review: styled() kept the buffers it rendered instead of the ones LayerCache::insert returned, so
without a blending-space conversion concurrent misses still returned separate body and pass
buffers (and the GPU uploaded each).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Preview workers that start together miss the layer cache together, and each kept its own copy
of every layer; on the GPU each copy was uploaded and packed into its own Classic 3D atlas, which
ran the device out of memory on a cold start. LayerCache::insert now keeps the first buffer of a
key and returns it, and the renderer goes on with the returned buffer, so the workers share one.
Renders don't wait for each other: on the shared frame pool a blocking wait could end up beneath
the work it waits for (tried, it stalled playback for the wait's timeout).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review: mask motion blur draws an animated mask at the shutter's other times, but the layer key
hashed its value at this time only. Two frames with the same mask value (a hold before a move)
shared a cached layer, with the wrong blur. This applied to solids, text and shapes already, and
to stills since this PR.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Footage layers had no layer cache key, so a still made a new layer buffer every frame on every
preview worker, and the GPU compositor uploaded it again each time (its upload cache is keyed
by buffer). Stills (without a proxy) are now keyed like text and shape layers, without the
source time; movies and sequences are unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
After Effects 2026 in a 32 bpc project, Levels (Individual Controls) with RGB
(0.1, 0.9, gamma 1.5, 0.05, 0.95), Red Gamma 0.8, Green Input White 0.8 and
Blue Output Black 0.2 on grey steps 0..255 (case 904 E07): every step matches
"each channel's controls, then the RGB controls" with nothing clipped
(values below Input Black end below Output Black, above Input White above
Output White). EffectCraft ran RGB first and clipped "Off for 32 bpc Color"
(it could not see the bit depth): up to 27/255 off on 95 % of the grid; now
0 grid points off, max 1/255, CPU and GPU.
EffectEnv gains float_depth (the renderer sets it for 32 bpc projects), so
"Off for 32 bpc Color" clips in 8 / 16 bpc projects as before. Unclipped
values below 0 take the gamma mirrored through 0. Plain Levels keeps its
order (its channel controls were not measured); its clipping follows the same
rule. EffectCraft's own projects default to 8 bpc and are unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
After Effects 2026 (sRGB working space, not linearised) maps red, green,
blue and 50% grey solids at Tint's defaults to 76, 150, 29 and 128/255:
Rec. 601 weights on the working-space values, not Rec. 709. CPU and GPU
kernel changed; tests pin the four greys within 1/255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
With Units set to Index the selector already counts characters (words,
lines), but the timeline kept showing Start, End and Offset as
percentages ("3.0%"), so switching looked like it did nothing. They are
now shown without the % sign while Units is Index
(render::text::in_index_units).
Engine part of viewer picking: replace / add / remove the top-coverage ID at a
layer-space point in one undo step, at the time the Selection was read. The
aux channels come from the render's own path (Renderer::layer_aux, shared with
the effect host; footage at its source time, 3D precomps) through a renderer
set up like Session::render (expressions, render prefs, layer cache). An
optional scale snaps the point to the pixel a preview at that resolution
samples. New effects::crypto_select quotes names and falls back to <hex> for
unnamed, wildcard-looking or ambiguous names. effect.cryptomatteAt is the
read-only hover query.
Synthetic bold grows a glyph's outline in its own space, so a
non-uniform character Scale stretches it more along one axis. The patch
and layer bounds reserved it through mean_scale and could clip the
stretched side; they now reserve how far the bold reaches along x and y.
A run of solid fills grows its glyphs together in layer space by one
radius, which only matches when the bold stays round there: a bold glyph
whose matrix stretches or skews is no longer gathered into a run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Replacing a virtual file bumps a counter the UI lookup reads. The content hash runs on that miss, from a callback, so the frame path does not stat every footage item or hash on every store write.
The layout marks a glyph synth_bold when Faux Bold is on, or when a bold
style is asked of a family without a bold face, but the renderer never
read it, so both drew as regular.
PlacedGlyph now carries the bold radius (0.03 em, which brings Inter
Regular's stems to Inter Bold's). A bold fill is the outline's coverage
merged with a round stroke twice that wide, and a bold glyph's stroke is
the band between the outline grown by radius ± half the stroke width, so
it follows the bolder shape. Runs of solid fills only merge glyphs of the
same bold radius, and the patch and layer bounds grow by it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Advanced 3D renderer folded Accepts Shadows (Off/On/Only) into a
bool, so a shadow catcher set to Only drew as an ordinary lit surface.
The material now carries shadows_only. Such a fragment draws black at
the strongest shadow a light casts on it, as Classic 3D does, and it
goes in the blended pass so what is behind it shows through. The CPU
shader and advanced3d.wgsl get the same branch.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Turning Solo on or off hides or shows every other layer at every frame, so it
now recaches the whole comp. The kept span is widened by the comp's shutter
(phase and angle), since a frame's motion blur samples cameras, lights and
transforms up to three frames away. Comp::any_solo is shared with the
renderer so both read Solo the same way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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