Inside the Shell

What to take forward

• The moodboard and words together give the crisp look. A run that starts from a round-1 image brings back that image's painterly texture: compare e1 with e2, and e7 with e14.
• With words alone, Midjourney can forget that the world is hollow. e13 drew an ordinary valley and a small planet. The ground kept curving up when the prompt asked for the meadow to close overhead (e2), or when the starting image already curved (e6, e12).
• The wave keeps its shape only when the run starts from an image. The curtain came from runs that started at b3-0 (e15, e16), and from words alone e17 turned it into a breaking wave. In round 3, starting from e16-3 and e12-3 with e14-3 as the style reference kept the curtain and brought in the top image's colours (f6, f2), and runs from words alone wrapped the wave around e14-3's tunnel (f1, f7).
• Every image stayed in daylight except for the Lantern's glow, which stays orange whenever a run starts from a3, even with --no sunset.
• Paws are still what Midjourney gets wrong most: e8-0, e8-3 and e11-3 all show human fingers. Six images came with black bars and are cropped.
• The taste model again ranks the quiet wave highest. e6-0, the wave with no paint, is first of the 68, and in round 1 w1-2 was second. The skins are last again.
• For the next round, use e14-3 as the style reference together with the moodboard. In round 3 it carried its colours into all 32 images, but it also brings back its swirl, so start from an image whenever the shape matters. Start the Lantern from e10-1, and describe its glow as white in the prompt. Describe the paw in every prompt that shows one: round, mitten-like, one short stub, no thumb, no human skin.

Picks

Four images on this page are fixed in Paper with Nano Banana 2.1, which changed only the fault named under each one, on the board "Inside the Shell · round 2 fixes".

The inside of the shell

It plainly shows the inside of a sphere, and it came from the moodboard and words alone.

Prompt

Inside a small hollow world on a clear day, the meadow curving up on every side and closing overhead into the sky, cream paths climbing the curve, a warm small sun at the centre, low ground mist, one small traveller, candy sky blue, soft meadow greens, blush pink flowers, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354

Your own paw

The original has an oversized thumb pad on the raised paw and human fingers on the grip, which break the paw rule, and the Paper fix changes only those. "Mittens" is a rounder take.

Prompt

First-person view of your own chubby round bunny paw, soft cream fur with a faint mint hologram rim, holding a realistic dark grey pistol, a bright meadow in front that curves up into the sky of a hollow world, a mint gate in the distance, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354

The Lantern by day

This is round 1's a3 composition in daylight, looking straight up at the Lantern, with the original's orange outer glow fixed to a noon white with a pale gold edge.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/aeea7ef0-26b2-5548-a0c7-080d886b4650/original.png Looking straight up from a bright meadow at the central sun of a hollow world at midday, a round lantern of soft white-gold light that is also a giant screen, a ring of light around it showing a simple bunny face and a row of score dots, faint scanlines and thin colour fringes on the screen only, the meadow, cream paths and small trees curving up all around and hanging upside down overhead, candy sky blue haze, soft greens, cream and blush pink, clear daylight, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354 --sref https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/91321b37-f17e-5761-9155-9609acf617e3/original.png --no sunset, dusk, orange glow

The wave as a curtain

Round 3 redrew round 2's e16-3 in the top image's colours: lime grass, cornflower sky, flat white clouds and cosmos flowers. This is the painted wave described under "Painting the wave on purpose", and f6-1 is a close alternative.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/aff183f5-cde7-5cf8-8f72-77fef46db38e/original.png A gravity wave crossing a hollow world on a clear day, made visible by the hologram system as a tall translucent curtain of rainbow refraction and chromatic aberration sweeping across a flower meadow, the meadow seen through the curtain shifted and tinted in bands of pink, mint and lemon, petals lifted and drifting in its path, a tiny white bunny player at the edge of the meadow, the ground curving up into the sky, fresh lime and spring green meadow with soft mid-green shadows, cornflower blue sky, flat white clouds, pink and white cosmos with yellow centres, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354 --no droid, robot, black bars, letterbox, lilac clouds, dark forest green --sref https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/a855e601-6e08-4893-85a7-67281aff3300/original.png

Back to a2

This redraws round 1's a2-0 and a2-3 in daylight, a kawaii bunny with a real rifle. The original holds the rifle in pink human hands, and the fix gives the bunny its own fur paws.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/5829cb26-8632-501c-98c8-e8cf9eb0b04d/original.png https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/a27c642d-4a2e-5eea-8a85-cf6f13caf1fe/original.png A kawaii bunny hologram skin holding a realistic modern rifle in a bright meadow inside a hollow world, cream fur, blush cheeks, thin red and cyan colour fringes along the hologram's edges, the ground curving up into a candy blue sky, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354

How the wave should look

Surface gravity in the game is 22 m/s², and the sweep on the Field events page is an extra push of 6 m/s² in a band 30 m wide that moves at 24 m/s. These numbers say that the wave itself is nearly invisible, and players see it only through the things it moves.

What the push does to the world

• Everything loose moves together. Gravity speeds up every mass by the same amount, so inside the band the air, mist, petals and players slide along together without swirling. Swirls form only at the band's edges, where the pushed air meets still air and the ground. Wind is gusty all the way through, so when everything slides calmly and only the edges curl, a player can tell that the push is gravity.
• "Down" tilts by about 15° where the push runs along the ground, because a sideways push of 6 against a pull of 22 tilts it by arctan(6/22). Hair, capes, flames, smoke and ribbons all tilt at once. A pond gets a single ripple, because the band passes in 1.25 s, which is too fast for the water to slosh.
• The grass leans late. The grass and the air around it get the same push, so at first no wind blows across the blades. The air leaves the band moving at about 4 m/s, a gentle breeze, so the grass leans most at the back of the band and keeps leaning after the band has passed. Leaning blades catch the light at a different angle, so a silver stripe travels through the grass. From the far side of the world, 196 m away, the stripe spans about 9° of view, roughly 17 times the width of the Sun in Earth's sky.
• The mist rises and sinks. A layer of mist held down by gravity grows taller as gravity gets weaker, roughly in proportion to 1/g. On the wall the band is leaving, the push points away from the ground, so weight drops from 22 to 16 m/s² and the mist swells to about 40% taller. On the wall the band is heading into, the push points into the ground, so weight rises to 28 and the mist flattens to about four fifths of its height. Where the push runs along the ground, the mist is swept forward and piles into a low roll at the front of the band.

Refraction and colour fringes

• Real physics gives no visible refraction here. Gravity this weak bends light by a few 10⁻¹⁵ radians. The air squeezed at the band's front changes its refractive index by about 3×10⁻⁷, which is dozens of times weaker than the shimmer over a hot road, and the change is spread over metres, while the shimmer over a road happens within centimetres. Any shimmer we add is a story choice. If we add one, it should bend every colour equally, as gravity and air both do, and stay within 1–2 px at 1080p, inside the mist roll.
• Colour fringes belong to holograms. Gravity never splits light into colours. Diffraction does, and holograms are made by diffraction: red light (650 nm) bends about 1.23 times as far as green (530 nm), and blue (450 nm) about 0.85 times as far. The story already says the Loom writes both the gravity field and the bunny skins, and that a wave is the Loom rewriting itself. So as the band passes, a projection can slip a little out of place and spread into a colour fringe about 40% as wide as the slip (1.23 − 0.85 ≈ 0.4), red on the leading edge and blue on the trailing edge, and then spring back.

The rule: colour fringes appear only on what the Loom projects, which is the skins, the projected guns, the Lantern's screen and the gate rings. Real things, meaning the meadow, bodies and sky, move and tilt, and at most shimmer without colour. So during a wave, players can tell at a glance that anything with a colour fringe is projected.

Painting the wave on purpose

The system that runs the holograms also holds the gravity field, so it knows exactly where the push is, and it can paint the push into the air on purpose with round 1's refraction and colour. The paint reads as the hologram system's mark where it touches something, lying on the ground or bending the grass and petals. Hung in open sky, it looks like an ordinary rainbow (f4). This keeps the rule above, because the painted wave is itself a projection.

Light crossing the band really is bent, by the push times the distance travelled divided by c², which comes to about 2×10⁻¹⁵ rad. The overlay draws the same bend about a trillion times larger, so the background shifts furthest where the push is strongest and in the direction it points. Then it spreads the colours the way the skins do. Players can read the band's strength and direction from the bend and the fringe.

Starting values for the shaders

e6-0 below shows the wave with no paint, started from round 1's w1-2, whose prompt came from this reasoning: what the field does on its own, under whatever the hologram system draws.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/509c2b5b-c298-51a3-82a0-d0761927c045/original.png A soft gravity wave crossing a hollow world on a clear day, the long grass leaning in one travelling silver stripe, petals sliding sideways in calm parallel lines, a low roll of ground mist along its front, a small figure whose cape tilts with it, the far meadow overhead showing the same stripe, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354