Dustfall

What it can come out as

How each one is actually drawn - region by region, and the layers it is built from - is on the coding tab.

Crossing two of them

Finding one

About 1 in 893 wild horses is born showing this. That is the whole of the supply: catch one, or make one with the carrot below. Breeds set their own pools and a breed built around this gene will carry it far more often than the wild population does.

Its gene carrot

The file

common/src/main/resources/horsegenetics/genes/dustfall.json — a data-driven gene, not a Java class. It is listed in the index.json beside it and registered by Genes' class initialiser at startup.

Why it is built this way

The source was an SVG: five flat colours traced off a photograph - a black butterfly on a taupe ground, with angular chips of raspberry, yellow and teal thrown across the whole frame. About 75 KB of path data. The butterfly is not taken from it: it is one particular object and a silhouette, and what was asked for was the dust. The four colours and the way the chips drift are what carry over.

SPECKLE is the mask this is: fine stipple with no boundary anywhere, which is the one thing in the vocabulary that has no shape at all. Everything else here draws an edge somewhere, and dust has none - it only has density.

Three scatters on three seeds, and they are deliberately NOT concentric. Every other multi-layer gene in this set shares one seed so its draws line up; this one must not, because in the source the three colours have nothing to do with each other - they interleave and overlap, and a shared lattice would put a raspberry chip, a yellow chip and a teal chip on the same spot on every cell and read as one three-coloured speck rather than as three separate falls of dust.

clumping is what makes it dust rather than static. At 0 SPECKLE is even noise across the whole horse; wound up, a slow field pushes the density around, so the same number of specks arrives in drifts. The three colours run different clumpScales - 9, 11 and 13 - so their drifts do not coincide, which is the other half of keeping the scatters independent.

Size: a texel is about half a body unit, so a spacing much under 0.5 is scattered single pixels and nothing coarser than about 1.5 still reads as dust. The three sit at 1.0 to 1.25 with size around 0.45, which puts a speck at roughly one texel - one pixel of colour with clear coat around it, which is what a chip of dust is.

Each colour carries a gentle lean as well as its clumping: raspberry low and forward, teal high and back, yellow even. That is the source's composition rather than its texture, and it is one soft AXIS band each - enough to stop the horse reading as uniform confetti without turning any colour into a region marking.

The taupe haze is first and faint on purpose. It is not in the vocabulary's sense a layer of the pattern; it is what makes three scatters of bright chips read as dust having settled rather than as paint having been flicked.

What it paints

Each outcome, described the way the gene file describes it, and then the layers that draw it in the order they are painted. The prose is the part a reader checks a bake against; the list underneath is what the engine actually did.

Dustfall

Chips of raspberry, yellow and teal dust lie scattered over the whole coat, each colour drifting thicker in its own places, with a faint taupe bloom under the heaviest of it.

Layer order is haze, raspberry, yellow, teal - the source has the teal reading over the other two where they meet, and with three overlapping scatters at one texel each, whichever goes last wins those texels.

1. the taupe haze where the dust lies heaviest — NOISE, painted with TOWARD
2. raspberry, leaning low and forward — AXIS × SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD
3. yellow, falling evenly — SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD
4. teal, leaning high and back — AXIS × SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD

Single-colour dust

The same three falls of dust, all of them in one colour this line of horses runs to, separated by how pale each one settles rather than by hue.

The recessive coloured half of the usual pair, and the one place this gene drops to a single hue knob rather than three. Three independent hues would spend most of their range on three near-identical muddy colours, and the thing that makes the dominant form work is that its three are far apart on the wheel - which a random draw cannot promise. So the three scatters keep their independence in lattice and drift and give it up in colour, separating by lightness instead: 0.38, 0.6, 0.82.

The seeds, spacings, clumpings and leans are byte-for-byte the dominant form's, so a foal that changes form keeps its parents' exact dust and only the colours move.

1. the haze where the dust lies heaviest — NOISE, painted with TOWARD
2. the dark fall, leaning low and forward — AXIS × SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD
3. the mid fall, falling evenly — SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD
4. the pale fall, leaning high and back — AXIS × SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

Clean.

Paints nothing.