fix: gallery quality audit of the six newest examples

[TMHSDigital]

Visual and editorial quality audit of the six most recently shipped gallery examples (color-attribute-wheel, parent-inverse-orrery, grease-pencil-rosette, armature-bend, text-version-stamp, image-pixels-testcard), judged against the gallery's strongest images (bmesh-gear, damped-track-aim, compositor-glare). Every hero render was inspected at full size and thumbnail scale — real pixels, not filenames.

Audit table

Example	Composition	Lighting	Materials	Legibility	Consistency	Card/README	Verdict
color-attribute-wheel	✗ disc low in frame, ~25% dead wall, heavy foreshortening	✗ flat; horizon band crossing the disc face	✗ specular reflected the wall/floor horizon as a hard line	✓ reads as a color wheel	✗ no warm staged backdrop	✓	FAIL → fixed
parent-inverse-orrery	✓	✓ warm dark studio	✓ brass/designed	✓	✓	✓	PASS — untouched
grease-pencil-rosette	✓	✓ neon on dark	✓	✓	✓	✗ card wrote frames.new().drawing (raises TypeError as written; README/code use frames.new(1))	PASS visually; card copy fixed
armature-bend	✓ rest→half→full reads left to right	✗ flat wash, light grey backdrop, no shaped key or accent	✗ AgX desaturated the BoneTint bands to pastel	✓	✗ visibly apart from the dark staged gallery	✓	FAIL → fixed
text-version-stamp	✓	✓	✓ gold bevel + cyan accent	✓ self-proving version text	✓	✓	PASS — untouched
image-pixels-testcard	✓	✓	✓	✓ jagged circle is documented, authentic pixel-buffer evidence	✓	✓ (589,824 = 512×288×4 verified)	PASS — untouched

Fixes applied

color-attribute-wheel (re-rendered, 5 iterations)

• Disc restaged to lean upright toward the camera (52° tilt) and fill the frame; camera pulled in and re-aimed.
• Warm backdrop wedge added, positioned between the disc and the wall — from any position in front, a grazing area light draws a hard terminator line across the flat disc face (this, plus specular horizon reflection, was the band crossing the original hero).
• Material made fully matte (Roughness 0.85, Specular IOR Level 0) so the wall/floor horizon no longer reflects across the face.
• Hue origin rotated −52° in wheel_geometry() so the perceptually sharp red 0°/360° wrap reads as a deliberate diagonal spoke instead of a seam artifact lying level with the horizon. The check recomputes from the same hsv list and never ties hue to angle — contract unchanged, no tolerance touched.
• README gallery-row alt text updated to describe the new staging.

Before: washed flat pancake low in frame with a seam-like band. After: frame-filling upright wheel on the dark stage with a warm light pool behind it.

armature-bend (re-rendered, 2 iterations)

• Root cause of the flat look: the script staged a dark studio but never set a view transform, so AgX + heavy key/fill washed it light grey and pastel. Now uses the Standard view transform (same rationale and comment style as the wheel script) so the BoneTint weight bands — the very thing the LBS check asserts — stay saturated.
• Key reduced/shaped, fill cut, cool rim retuned, warm wedge added raking the back wall; floor/world darkened to match the gallery studio values.

Before: flat light-grey scene with pastel tubes. After: dark staged studio, saturated teal→amber→coral weight bands, shaped falloff.

grease-pencil-rosette (copy only)

• examples/gallery.json card: frames.new().drawing → frames.new(1).drawing; gallery pages regenerated with scripts/build_gallery.py.

Verification

Proven by live run (local):

• Check-only path exit 0 on Blender 4.5.11 LTS and Blender 5.1.2 for both modified examples (4.5 and 5.1 are both installed locally; version strings from the binaries' own output).
• Renders produced on Blender 5.1.2 EEVEE; every iteration's pixels inspected at full size and thumbnail scale.
• Hero (1280×720) and preview (1200×675) webp assets regenerated from the final renders and visually verified against the PNGs (no color shift).

Established by inspection only:

• Cycles render path (--engine cycles) not exercised — no scene-graph change is engine-specific (lights/camera/materials only).
• 4.5 EEVEE Next render path — relies on the identical scene code plus the existing engine-id gate; CI smoke runs check-only by design.

No checks were loosened; no generated pages hand-edited; release-owned version fields untouched.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code