Alpine roadside and winter reference pass — 2026-09-15

The user's new photographs 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 and 13 are the visual reference: dense mixed woodland behind rough grassy verges, low understory between road and trunks, and snow resting on upper fir branches beside a cleared winter road. The photographs are references only; none is incorporated into the game.

Source changes

• Alpine grass now samples two complete photographed tufts within the existing source UV atlas. The previous whole-atlas quad also displayed stretched individual-blade texture islands. Irregular 2–4 tuft groups occur every 2.6 m (6.5 m on Low), between 8.7 and 18 m from the centreline, with height/slope/road-clearance checks. Upward foliage normals retain the same lighting on both sides.
• Up to 130 low broadleaf saplings (55 on Low) fill suitable forest edges between 13 and 30 m from the road. These reuse existing photographed LOD2 geometry, are spatially batched and add no collision objects. They do not fill valley meadows indiscriminately.
• Stage 3 adds cached snow meshes to the upper-facing portions of the existing LOD0/LOD1 fir needle geometry. Original bough alpha determines the outline; original dark bark and lower needles remain. FirSnow_color.png is byte-identical to its CC0 source. The Unity importer maps RGB channels to one while preserving alpha; no pixel readback or custom shader is used. Source hash and licence are in ALPINE-SNOW-ASSETS.json.
• Stage 3 snow margins have four sloping cross-section bands with continuous, varying widths/heights. The clear-asphalt approach has smaller side deposits; the existing SurfaceAt snow sectors have higher banks. All geometry remains beyond 8.7 m from the centreline and is visual only. The snow road boundary, DEM, road coordinates and physics were not changed.

Validation and open limits

Offline compilation after this pass succeeded: 84 Runtime and 18 Editor sources, zero warnings/errors. This is not a native render or performance pass. Root serializes the next Unity bake and Windows frame review. No Unity or player process was started by the art subtask.

The current orthophoto/material stand was deliberately unchanged pending its first native capture. The preceding blue-rock and repeated-grass frames remain rejected. The new reference pass needs actual driving-camera comparison for tuft density, snowcap clipping, imported channel swizzles and snowbank grounding. Distant whole-tree/card LODs still use the summer photograph; winter colour continuity at the LOD1/card boundary is an explicit remaining art limitation, not an accepted AAA result.