Shot 3: The Keeper of the Gate · Road to Redemption

The top of the climb. Every climb ends at heaven's gate, against the fallen who keeps it that age (decided, see the overview), and this shot would fix that moment in the engine. It proves the register neither shot 1 nor shot 2 can: heaven drawn white in ink, with no colour but the fallen's embers, and a horde that still reads on white ground.

The painting above is the target: a concept painting from the game's camera, four fallen in a warm pool on the white court, the keeper's red coal, his white dead in a ring, still angels on the walls, the gate's arches receding into white.

Proposal

What it shows


Place	The court before heaven's gate: white flagstones, crenellated walls and towers, the gate's pointed arches nested inside pointed arches, receding into white. The House does not show.
Register	Heaven: high key, most of the frame in white and pale grey, ink black for every shape. The embers, the keeper's coal and his dead's eyes are the only colour.
Camera	The game camera, unchanged, zoomed in as in shot 1, so the two shots compare frame for frame.
Moment	Mid-fight, with a ring of open stone between the party and the horde, the keeper stepping in from the gate.

On screen

The party (centre, slightly left). Four fallen in a loose diamond, the same models as shot 1: dark cloaks, the ember at the chest, a small warm pool of light on the white stone. They read as dark shapes on white, as in a sunlit field.
The keeper (upper centre). A fallen, taller than the party, in dark battered plate, a coal glowing deep red through the crack of his breastplate. A fallen's coal stays red at its heart however cold its light has grown (decided), so his reads red, not orange.
His white dead (all around, fading into white at the edges). What a fallen raises wears the shapes of the dead in its own white, with the coal's red in its eyes (decided). Gaunt bone-white figures in rags, with two red points for eyes. They are a horde for the readability test: white shapes with ink outlines and ink shadow, on white ground, so their read comes from the ink.
The still angels. Rows of robed angels on the walls and around the court, wings folded, perfectly still, all watching. Props, not monsters: they never move.
Light. Cold white light from no source, so shadows are short flat ink shapes under every figure and arch. The ember pool is small and warm. No coloured fill and no fog colour: the edges dissolve into white mist.

What it needs

An ink pass. Black outlines on every model (an edge pass on depth and normals, or inverted hulls on the near levels of detail), with a weight that holds at the game camera's distance.
Flat shading and ink shadows. Two or three tones per surface, shadows quantised to a flat black shape, the high-key exposure of heaven. A lookdev preset of its own, beside shot 1's.
The white court. A heaven variant of the map: flagstones, wall and tower modules, the nested gate, still-angel statues as instanced props. Gothic carving lives in the texture and the ink, not the vertex count.
New monsters and a boss. The keeper (a hero-sized model like the party's) and his raised dead (one shared mesh, the horde's budgets), plus a red-eye emissive.
Reused: the fallen, the rim material (a rare must still read gold on white), the HUD, the scene system.

Done when

It reads like the painting: a white frame drawn in ink, a small warm pool, a red coal, a horde that reads by its outlines, rarity at a glance, and the embers the only colour. The 2,000-monster bench stays near its baseline with the ink pass on (see docs/performance.md).

Where it sits

Shot 1 fixes the deep, shot 2 the daylit world, and this one heaven: one shot per register of the climb. The painting's prompt and its edit are in design/target-shots/concept/3/prompts/; it was painted with heaven's bridge painting (heaven/arrival-bridge-side.jpg) as the style reference and shot 1's key art for the camera, then edited once to give the gate its nested arches.

Open questions

Is the gate's keeper the right moment, or should heaven's shot be a pinnacle fight in a white court where the angels watch, fallen against fallen, with no horde?
How strong should the ink be in the engine? Settled on 26 October 2026: in heaven every shape is inked, the fallen and the horde included, since ink is the war's line (see visual identity). What is left to measure is the line's weight at the game camera's distance.