A linear mask at 45° was not at 45°, and a radial with equal radii was an
ellipse. Both on every photograph that is not square, which is all of them.
The geometry is stored in normalised coordinates so that a mask survives a
crop, a zoom and an export at another size — that part was right. What was
wrong is that a *distance* was being measured in those coordinates too, and a
fraction of the width is not the same length as a fraction of the height. So
`dot(uv - centre, axis)` measured the ramp in a space one of whose axes is
squashed against the other by the aspect ratio, and the iso-lines came out
sheared: on a 3:2 frame a ramp asked for at 45° arrives at about 34°.
Nothing announces it. The stored numbers are exactly what was written, the
shader is doing exactly what it says, and the only place the fault exists is
between the photographer's intent and the picture. It has been invisible so far
because there is no way yet to place a gradient by eye — the handles that make
it visible are what turned it up.
So distances and angles move into the frame's own isotropic units: y spans
`0..1` and x spans `0..aspect`, which makes a circle round and 45° a real
diagonal. The centre stays a plain fraction of each axis, because it is a point
and a point has no such problem — and because that is the space a click arrives
in. `frame_delta` is the one conversion and must stay the only one; the mask
array's own dimensions carry the aspect, so it costs no uniform.
The sidecar format does not change. What changes is what the numbers mean, and
the only geometry in the wild is a default that has never been movable.
The two tests are at 96×64 rather than square, which is the whole point: on a
square target this bug cannot be reproduced, and every existing mask test was
square. Both fail without the conversion — the radial reaching 28px sideways
where it reaches 19px down, and the diagonal landing on the wrong side of the
line it is supposed to lie along.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
dtourolleandClaude Opus 5
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