Field Notes #05 — light on black

Every glowing thing on this site — the planet, the flare, the logo itself — is an image of light on pure black, composited with mix-blend-mode: screen. Black drops out, light adds. No alpha channels, no codec fights, works in every browser.

This note walks through the pipeline: rendering plates on black in Blender, keying elements that were never delivered with transparency, and the GLSL flare that replaced a whole folder of PNGs.

Field Notes is our engineering-notebook series — the real decisions, including the wrong turns.