section 12
field notes
print - pin - steal

Field Notes

These are short references you can print and keep nearby, plus breakdowns of how the site’s tools work. The breakdowns include failed approaches where they explain a useful limitation or debugging step.

Cheat Sheets (Print These)

Sheet - 1 page

Maths For TAs

Dot, cross, lerp, remap, smoothstep - the whole family with what-it's-for one-liners and the formulas you keep re-deriving. Keep it nearby when building shaders or procedural tools.

-> Sheet - 1 page

VEX Quick Reference

The syntax, attribute bindings, and twenty functions that carry daily wrangle work - the pocket edition of the 950-snippet library.

-> Sheet - 1 page

Texture Compression Formats

BC1 through BC7, ASTC, when sRGB goes on or off, and bytes-per-pixel - the table you need every time an import dialog asks questions.

Breakdowns

Breakdown - long-form

How The Channel Packer Was Built (And Why It Encodes Its Own Pngs)

A full postmortem of this site's Texture Channel Packer: how premultiplied alpha can change packed channel values, why the fix was writing a PNG encoder from scratch in JavaScript, and what the whole detour teaches about trusting your pipeline's file formats. Reads as a case study in TA debugging - the tool is almost beside the point.

canvas internals - premultiplied alpha - png format - crc32 - checking exported pixel values

3cheat sheets

1breakdown (more coming)

A4print-friendly

0pdfs to maintain

"The best documentation is the page someone actually pins up."