| name | art-direct-room |
| description | Transform a canonical room source brief, visual references, and project-wide book or game direction into an implementation-ready visual room design. Use before building or substantially revising a 3D environment, illustration set, animation layout, game room, or visual-book location when source facts must be expanded with coherent architecture, furnishings, set dressing, density, lighting, and shot coverage without confusing invention with canon. |
Art Direct a Room
Turn factual source material into a deliberate environment design before implementation.
Workflow
- Read references/room-design-schema.md.
- Require a canonical source brief. If none exists, use an appropriate source adapter first; do not infer canon from reference images.
- Inspect every supplied image at useful resolution. Inventory recurring architectural, furnishing, prop, palette, lighting, scale, and composition motifs.
- Read the project-wide design, prose, synopsis, and visual-direction documents that govern tone beyond the room itself. Route sources from most authoritative to least: current explicit design/style specification, executable story source, current synopsis/premise, room-specific notes, then QA or historical audits. Record and resolve disagreements instead of blending them.
- Classify every proposed element as
CANON, REFERENCE, INFERRED, or ATMOSPHERE. Preserve source citations for CANON and reference attribution for REFERENCE.
- Resolve contradictions among references into one coherent room. State which motifs are retained, adapted, or rejected.
- Design in passes: structural shell, hero masses, functional storage, wall systems, work clusters, floor dressing, then accents.
- Define spatial zones, circulation, attachment relationships, and distinct state variants before choosing implementation primitives.
- Derive story cameras from source-brief story beats when no camera list exists. Set density targets per story camera. Use projected visible silhouette or tonal-mass occupancy, silhouette hierarchy, depth planes, vertical articulation, and cluster scale rather than raw object count. State which occupancy interpretation is used.
- Produce the room design using the schema, including a camera coverage matrix and an implementation priority order.
- Audit that invention supports rather than competes with canonical objects and actions.
Design rules
- Treat source facts as a floor, not a ceiling.
- Add plausible environmental content freely when it reinforces occupation, craft, history, scale, and story tone.
- Prefer a few strong furniture and architectural silhouettes before many tiny props.
- Build density through layers: structure, furniture, storage, clusters, and accents.
- Keep functional negative space around paths, actions, characters, and unrelated fixtures.
- Avoid copying mutually incompatible reference details into one incoherent collage.
- Reserve quiet areas deliberately for text and focal contrast; do not confuse intentional rest with unfinished blankness.
- Make state-changing canon geometry feasible in the design.
Completion standard
Deliver a design only when it identifies the visual thesis, retained reference language, rejected conflicts, categorized inventory, spatial zones, hero masses, density targets, state variants, lighting, camera coverage, implementation priorities, and unresolved decisions. The design must be renderer-agnostic; renderer-specific geometry belongs in the implementation skill.
