Alvheim: research portfolio

The elf village on Alvehylla, under Alvtinden, and the way up to it. Raw material for Alvheim's zone book: findings, then rules a frame or an asset can be checked against. Made 2026-10-01. Prompts are in prompts.json and prompt-blocks.md, sources in sources.md, Petter's decisions in open-questions.md.

Read docs/art-direction.md in a local file first. Where this portfolio departs from it, the section says "Departs from the rulebook".

Alvheim in one sentence

A small village that has been awake at night for a thousand years: pale giant trees, warm windows high up, a well that holds the moon, and tall quiet people who are glad you came.

Findings

Today's Alvheim, measured

From the stills in a local file (her camera on the square) against this portfolio's key frames. Luma is display luma (0–1) of a frame scaled to 320 × 180; "glow cores" are pixels whose brightest channel is over 0.78 and that are saturated or near white.

What that says:

1. The village is as dark by day as by night. Her camera stands in the giant trees' shade, so the ground's median luma is 0.13 at 13:00 and 0.13 at 22:00. Day has no look of its own.
2. At night the lanterns win over the well. Warm cores outnumber cool ones 3.5 to 1 and their halos are the biggest shapes in the frame. The moonwell, the reason the place exists, is a thin lilac line.
3. 10–13 % of a dusk or arch frame is under luma 0.08, the rulebook's floor ("no black").
4. The shapes are thin. The arch is two white ribs, the lantern a wire crook, the tree house a turret on a pole with a wire stair. All of it flickers at distance and none of it could be meshed from an image.
5. The trees are the forest's stock trees (dark green blob crowns, dark trunks next to the pale house trees). The "huge pale trees" read as white poles among ordinary trees.
6. The elves in cast-art rounds 2 and 3 (a local file, tinde-r3.png, sildre-r3.png) are drawn with STYLE_INSIDE: chibi villagers in Frozen-like dresses with pointed ears. They read as Solengen children in costume. The rulebook already says they must be redrawn in the outside look.

What the references give, and what to leave

Two things are distinctly Norwegian and are used here because no other fantasy elves have them: folk-dress forms (a fitted bodice over a bell skirt, a knee-length coat, a shoulder cape, one woven band) and stave-church and loft woodwork (interlaced loop bands round doors, scaled shingle roofs, an upper storey wider than the foot, as on a stabbur).

Rules

1. Where Alvheim sits among the looks

Alvheim is painted with the outside look's brush and has its own shapes, palette and light.

Departs from the rulebook: LOOK_PLACES gives Alvheim the paint pass at 0.6. Keep 0.6 for the pass's bands and mute (at 1 they posterise the glow gradients and grey the moss), and make every asset fully painted. The lower pass strength is a property of the screen pass and says nothing about how painted the models are.

2. Palette

Departs from the rulebook: it lists elf violet and magic cyan as Alvheim's accents. Add moon blue as the well's and the runes' colour (the kit already paints them blue-violet), keep the rulebook's gold as the lanterns' honey, and ban ember #FF8A3D in Alvheim: ember is the telegraph colour of danger and there is none here.

Never in Alvheim: red, orange, saturated yellow-green, gold metal, brown earth paths (trodden ground is dark teal-grey #3E5F66), black.

3. Glow: two families, a budget

1. Warm light is where people are, cool light is where magic is. A lantern, a window and the seat ring's lamp are honey. Water, runes, flowers, thread and gems are cool. Nothing mixes them: no blue lantern, no golden rune.
2. One brightest thing. Where Månebrønnen is in view it is the brightest object in the frame, day, dusk and night. No lantern within 8 m of it; its water's core may reach white, a lantern's glass may not.
3. Budget per frame (glow cores as measured above): day ≤ 1 % (sky excluded), dusk ≤ 5 %, night ≤ 4 %. With halos, the rulebook's 10 % stands. key-3-night has 3.0 %.
4. Night balance in the square: cool cores ≥ warm cores (key-3-night is 4 : 1; today's game frame is 1 : 3.5). On Lyktestien and at the arch warm may lead (key-4-arrival is 1.6 : 1): the way in is lit by people.
5. A halo is at most 3 × its lantern's glass on screen and never clips to white outside the glass.
6. Glow is small on the thing that carries it: a rune stroke, the heart of a bell, the last row of a cloth, one gem. Never a whole object, never a whole plant, never an elf's skin or dress.
7. Runes glow only on stone, and one per run of path (seven stones). key-3-night breaks this with a rune on every stone; that reads as a runway.

4. Shape language and motifs

Three verbs for every silhouette: it leans (3–8° off plumb), it tapers (the top is at most half the foot's width) and it curls or points at its end. Nothing is a box, nothing is mirrored exactly, nothing is broken or jagged. Edges she can touch are rounded as inside the wall (a bevel of at least 8 % of the smallest dimension).

The motif sheet's rose band is drawn knitted. Weave it flat instead: the knitted rose is known abroad as a Christmas pattern (sources), and knit stitches are noise in a 1024² texture.

5. Materials

6. Light by day, dusk and night

The three key frames are one view (dusk and night are edits of the day image).

Day: the village sleeps. High, cool sun; silver trunks and roofs are the lightest shapes; ground in sun at luma 0.35–0.5 and in shade never under 0.2; long soft teal shadows; lanterns unlit; the well and its runes glimmer; flowers are plain flowers. Fewer elves about (the weaver at the loom, the guard at the arch). Target median luma 0.4–0.5 from her camera on the square; today it is 0.13, so the giant crowns need gaps or the place grade needs a fill light.

Dusk: the lighting. Rose-to-violet sky; trunks rose on one side, violet-teal on the other; Tinde lights the lanterns one by one along Lyktestien toward the well (a thing to watch: about half are lit in the frame); windows come on; flower hearts begin. Ground luma ≥ 0.15 and still teal-green (the rulebook's dusk rule, with a higher floor here).

Night: the hero time. Deep blue-violet sky, aurora in green and cyan with a violet fringe over Alvtinden, a small crescent moon. Moonlight keeps every surface readable: median luma 0.22–0.3, 2nd percentile ≥ 0.10, under 1 % of the frame below 0.08. Pale trunks stand lighter than the sky behind them. The well is brightest and lights whoever stands at it from below. All elves are out; Tingringen has singers.

7. Architecture and props

An elf-made thing always has:

1. a lean and a taper (rule 4), and a curl or a point at its end;
2. silver outside, honey inside;
3. one motif, the right one for its material (rule 4), and one small glow at most;
4. moss at its foot and on what faces up;
5. parts as thick as an arm or thicker: a post is ≥ 0.25 m at the foot, a step ≥ 0.12 m thick, a cord ≥ 5 cm.

It never has: right angles or boxes; nails, iron, hinges, chains (a lantern hangs from a wooden link or a thick cord); railings, balusters, lattice, wire; banners or flags; glass panes with bars; painted colour; gold; a spike or point below 1 m; text other than runes; a house on the ground (elves live in the trees; on the ground they only work and gather).

8. The elves

Who they are. Hidden folk of the mountain: old, unhurried, fond of songs and of visitors, a little odd (they count drops, sing to flowers, never hurry). Beautiful in a quiet way. They carry lanterns, harps, yarn and horns, never weapons.

Proportions (the princess is 1.2 m and 3 heads tall):

The head stays big (the same head as the outside folk); the height is in the neck, the waist and the long skirt or coat. The outline is a candle flame: narrow at the shoulders, a high fitted waist, one long bell to the hem. Departs from the rulebook only in adding the elves' row; outside folk stay 1/4–1/5.

Face, hair, ears.

• Eyes a quarter of the face's width each, whites visible, the iris softly glowing in the elf's own colour.
• A spray of 10–20 tiny pale star-freckles over cheeks and nose. They glow faintly at night. This is the elves' mark, in the place where Moonshadow elves have stripes.
• Ears: short, thick, leaf-shaped, flat to the head, the tip no higher than the brow.
• Hair moon-white or silver at the roots, shading to a faint tint (lilac, mint, pale blue, pink) at the ends. Always braided into masses as thick as a wrist: a crown braid, a braided bun, one braid lying on the back or the chest, two short braids. No loose hair, no fringe.
• Skin from birch-pale to warm brown. Old elves have smile lines and stand straight.

Clothes. Women: a fitted bodice and a bell skirt to the ankle. Men: a fitted knee-length coat over trousers and tall soft boots; old men a long coat. All: narrow sleeves; a short shoulder mantle with a hem of five rounded leaf points; one round silver brooch with a crescent; a broad cloth headband with one gem; exactly one woven band of eight-petal roses at the hem; felt boots.

How they glow. Four places, all small: the gem, the irises, the freckles, the hem band. Under 5 % of the figure's area. One colour per elf.

A meshable A-pose reference exists for all eight (art/cast-*.webp). The four ids in src/npc/elves.ts are kept.

Rules that survive meshing (from a local file, the cast-art grades in docs/cast-art.md, and the meshes below):

1. Ears short and thick (above). Both image models draw them long whatever the prompt says; check every image and redraw or paint them back before meshing.
2. Hair is one mass. A braid lies on the head, the back or the chest; it never hangs free beside the neck.
3. Nothing in the hands. Lantern, harp, yarn, horn and flower are separate props on the hand bone.
4. No staff, wand, bow, string, chain, earring, feather or floating rune.
5. The circlet is a cloth band at least 1/8 of the head's height with a flat gem; a wire circlet vanishes.
6. Narrow sleeves. Bell sleeves fuse with the skirt in A-pose and tear in a wave.
7. The mantle ends above the elbow and is rigged to the chest. A cape that reaches the forearm tears when the arm lifts (rodhette in docs/cast-art.md).
8. Both boots show under the hem; the hem is 10 cm over the ground.
9. Glow is painted flat in the accent colour with no painted halo round it, so the game's glow mask (src/world/looks.ts) can pick it out of the texture and a halo is not baked in as a pale smudge.
10. No painted runes or glyphs on the figure (they become bumps); the rose band is flat pattern only.

9. Flora and ground

• The giant pale trees: silver-white trunks 3–5 m thick, marks grey, big rounded roots with moss, a high crown of small blue-green leaves in a few large masses with sky gaps. All trees within 80 m of the well are this kind. A dark-trunked forest tree inside the ring breaks the place (today the ten ancient trees do).
• Moon bells: five to seven bells on arched stems over broad leaves, 0.4–0.7 m tall, in pale blue, violet or pink; one colour per clump; only the bell's heart glows. In drifts of 3–7 clumps along ways and round the well, none in the 3 m round a path's middle.
• Star moss: teal cushions with tiny pale star flowers that glow faintly at night; the ground cover under the trees.
• Glow caps: pale caps with a cyan glow underneath, on roots and logs in the old wood round the edge only.
• Ferns with fiddlehead spirals (the living form of the spiral motif); cotton grass and a white mountain flower at the edge, where Alvheim meets the mountain.
• Ground: teal moss in broad shapes, lighter cushions 1–3 m across, moonstone veins 0.3–1 m wide winding through it, pale gravel on ways, dark teal-grey where it is trodden. No snow inside ELF_GROUND, no brown earth, no grass blades over 15 cm.
• Technique for painterly clumps and motion is the flora portfolio's (../flora/).

10. The way up: the transition in six steps

Distances are polyline lengths from world/alvheim.ts and world/regions/fjellfoten.ts, measured from Alvestien's foot at Fjellfoten's edge (900, 257). From Varden it is 440 m more along Fjellstien. One new sign per step; nothing elf-made before the bridge.

Rules of the seam, like the town gates': nothing fully elf-made (a building, a tree house, the well's glow) is nearer the bridge than the arch, and nothing of the mountain (snow, grey rock, heather) is inside the arch.

The five way frames share one early-dusk light so that what changes between them is the place. The frames of steps 1–4 are painted more finely than the outside look calls for; they show staging, and the family portfolio owns the outside brush.

11. Meshing: how well the look survives

Pending. The three meshes were queued on zap but not run before this portfolio was written: the queue held seven jobs ahead at about 25 minutes each (2026-10-01). No mesh was looked at, so nothing below is a result. The orchestrator collects, judges and archives them; commands are in models/README.md.

What to look for in each -views.png, from the recipe and the cast-art grades (expectations, not findings):

• Eldrid: whether the leaf mantle's points stay separate from the upper arms (if they fuse, shorten the mantle to the shoulder seam and say "the mantle ends at the shoulder, the whole arm is free"); whether the crown braid stays a ring or melts into a cap; whether the ears come back as thick flaps (acceptable) or spikes; whether the back of the skirt keeps the rose band (the back is invented: if it is blank, the band must be re-projected or the hem painted in the pipeline); whether the hem band's violet is flat enough for the glow mask.
• Tree house: the underside of the wide upper storey and the stair's back half are invented; the slab steps may fuse into a ramp (then ask for "eight separate thick steps with clear gaps"); the moss cushions may become lumps with green smears; the crescent finial is the thinnest part.
• Lantern post: the two chain links and the flower stems are the thin parts and are expected to come back as blobs. art/krea-lantern.webp shows the fix: one thick link, and the flowers left off and planted in the engine. The glass is opaque in a mesh; its light is the game's (ELF_GLASS halo).

Two references are ready and not queued: art/mesh-arch.webp (Alveporten) and art/mesh-well.webp (Månebrønnen), and seven more elves (art/cast-*.webp).

12. Never

• A fantasy city: houses on the ground, towers, bridges between trees, waterfalls in the village, banners, railings. Both image models add them whenever a prompt says "elf village"; every scene prompt lists them as absent.
• Tolkien's elves (long loose hair, bows, armour, filigree, haughty faces) and Christmas elves (red and green, pointed hats, curled shoes, stripes, a white beard on a small round man, a knitted rose jumper).
• Amulet's elves (grey skin, slit eyes, uniforms, masks) and Moonshadow elves (horns, four fingers, blades).
• Eyes without pupils or whites; skin that glows; blue or grey skin.
• Ember orange, red, gold metal, black, brown earth.
• A lantern brighter than the well; a blue lantern; a golden rune; a rune on wood, cloth or skin; a loop band on stone.
• Thin things: wire crooks, ribs, railings, ladders, free strings, chains.
• Boxes, right angles, mirror symmetry, broken or jagged silhouettes.
• A dark-trunked tree, a spruce or snow inside the ring.
• A weapon on any elf.

13. Checklist

Hold an asset or a frame against it; every line is yes or no.

An asset

1. Does it lean 3–8°, taper to half its foot or less, and end in a curl or a point?
2. Is its motif the right one for its material (stone: rune; wood: loop and spiral; cloth: rose and leaf; silver: crescent and leaf), with at most one crescent?
3. Is wood silver outside and honey only inside?
4. Is its glow one small part, warm if people use it and cool if it is magic?
5. Is every part at least as thick as an arm (post ≥ 0.25 m, cord ≥ 5 cm)?
6. Is there moss at its foot?
7. Is its darkest texel lighter than #1B2740, and is it free of red, ember, gold and black?
8. Could the reference image be meshed: one object, whole, plain light-grey ground, no shadow, no thin part?

An elf

1. 5 heads tall (queen 5.5, child 3.5), shoulders 1.3 heads, a bell outline?
2. Star-freckles, glowing irises with whites, ears no higher than the brow?
3. Hair braided in thick masses that lie on the head or body?
4. One cloth colour, one leaf mantle above the elbow, one brooch, one headband gem, one rose band?
5. Glow in four places at most, under 5 % of the figure, one colour?
6. Empty hands in the reference; no weapon ever?

A frame

1. Is the well, if in view, the brightest thing?
2. Are glow cores within budget (day 1 %, dusk 5 %, night 4 %)?
3. At night in the square, are cool cores at least as many as warm ones?
4. Median luma: day 0.4–0.5, dusk 0.25–0.35, night 0.22–0.3; under 1 % of pixels below 0.08?
5. Are the trunks in the ring pale and lighter than the night sky behind them?
6. Is there calm, empty moss between the things (no cluster nearer than 6 m to the next)?
7. On the way up: does this stretch show only the signs its step allows?

Files

• art/: 34 images (33 generated, 1 palette sheet rendered in code), art/rejected/: 8 with their fault in prompts.json.
• prompts.json: every image's prompt, model, seed, size, provider, role and verdict.
• prompt-blocks.md: the reusable blocks and the image that proves each.
• models/: empty but for README.md: three meshes pending (rule 11), with the commands to fetch and archive them.
• sources.md, open-questions.md.
• Originals: a local file (with gen.sh, build.py, measure.py).