Mascot — construction and style¶

Voron is Russian for raven, so the manual's mascot is a raven (Corvus corax), drawn from real bird anatomy rather than from a circle-and-oval cartoon. Twenty files in three views, generated by scripts/gen_mascot.py — edit the script, not the SVGs.

View	When	Constructions
Profile	the bird is looking at something; the page is about that thing	`bird()`
Three-quarter	the bird is doing something and wants you to see it	`bird_3q()`
Front	the bird is addressing the reader directly	`bird_front()`

All three share the palette, the halo pass, the feather-row helper, the friendly expression (eyelid / gape hook / cheek catch), the .m-* animation classes and the reduced-motion gate. spread_wing works in every view; a fan seen from the front is just a mirrored pair.

Construction¶

The bird is built from feather rows, not blobs. row(n, base0, base1, angle0, angle1, len0, len1, w0, w1) shingles n lanceolate feathers along a baseline, interpolating direction and length; every plumage group in every pose comes out of that one call.

Group	What it is	Note
Skull	rounded wedge, flat crown, x 300–398	crown sheen runs crown → nape
Bill	heavy, hooked at the tip, as long as the skull	upper mandible `K1`, lower `K0`, gape line between
Nasal bristles	six tapers over the base of the culmen	the detail that says raven and not crow
Throat hackles	five pointed feathers that project past the throat line	the front silhouette is serrated, never smooth
Folded wing	envelope filled `K0`, then five rows: primaries → secondaries → greater → median → lesser coverts	sheen rides the median and lesser coverts only
Spread wing	a fan, not the folded wing rotated — see below	one construction, every extended-wing pose
Tail	five rectrices, alternating tones, graduated	wedge tail, longest feathers central
Legs	tarsus with four scale bands, three toes forward + hallux, claws	far leg `K0`, near leg `K1`
Breast	two faint scallop rows at 0.2 opacity	texture, never a bib

Plumage detail¶

Detail is spent where it survives 256 px, and nowhere else:

long_feather() draws a flight feather or rectrix, then plume() adds a rachis line and three barb strokes on the wide side. A few strokes, never a hatch — a hatch turns to noise at 256 px. Primaries and rectrices get three barbs, secondaries two.
shingle() draws a covert row twice: the full shape in a lighter rim tone, then an inner copy at 0.84 scale in the base tone. The pale fringe that leaves is what makes a covert row read as feathers instead of scales.
jitter(i) wobbles ruff and hackle lengths deterministically. A smooth length interpolation gives a row of lozenges; the wobble gives a shaggy mass.
Eye carries a thin pale ring (#5A6780 at 0.55) outside the disc, inside the socket.
Feet are three toes plus the hallux in every view, each with three scute bands and a claw. The three-quarter near foot has its toes separated rather than fanned as one mass.

Juvenile¶

bird_3q(juv=True) is the fledgling, used by helper:

	Adult	Fledgling
Head	scale 1.0	1.16 about the neck pivot, halo included
Bill	`BILL_3Q`, hooked	`BILL_3Q_JUV`, stubby, no hook
Gape	closed, hooked up at the hinge	slightly open, with a pale `#6B7689` flange
Eye	r 19 / 11	×1.2 — larger relative to the head
Ruff	pointed, jitter 0.24	×1.22, blunter, fluffier
Tail	`TAIL_3Q`	`TAIL_3Q_JUV`, shorter
Legs	full tarsus	stubbier, shorter toes

Feather rows must tile, not stack: a row whose bases sit closer together than its feather width collapses into one smooth mass. The hackles use alternating lengths for the same reason — a smooth length lerp gives a teardrop, not a fringe.

The three-quarter view¶

bird_3q(). The body is angled toward the reader and the head is turned further than the body, so both eyes read:

Near eye r 19 at (300, 142), full, with the catchlight. Far eye r 11 at (222, 148), near the head's edge, with the base of the bill across its lower corner. Equal-sized eyes read as an owl, not a turned head — the size difference is what sells the turn.
Bill foreshortened to ~0.8 of the profile length and given a culmen ridge line with a lit far facet on one side of it. The ridge is the single strongest cue that the head is turned.
Wings are seen near edge-on, so they are a dark mass: primaries at the tip and a short covert patch at the shoulder. The full profile rows compress into vertical stripes in this view and read as suspenders — that was the first thing to go wrong.
Ruff of five long hackle points across the throat in #3B465C / K2, much shaggier than the profile's serration, because in this view the throat faces the reader.
Head and shoulders merge — no neck pinch. A pinch makes a ball-headed penguin.

The front view¶

bird_front(). Not quite symmetric — about ten degrees of yaw toward the reader's right, so the bird stops being a blob while still reading as facing you. The far (right) side of the face is compressed, the far eye is r 17 against the near eye's r 20, the bill and its ridge sit ~7 units right of centre, and the bird's left shoulder is marginally forward. warn keeps symmetric shoulder origins and equal spans so its spread wings still read as a stop sign.

Bill is the identity here and is drawn large — a wedge from y 142 to 254 with a vertical culmen ridge, one darker facet, and a hooked tip. A small front bill reads as a chick.
Both eyes r 19 at (206, 134) and (306, 134), each with its own lid.
Bristles as a tuft spraying down both sides from the top of the bill.
Gape is two short lines under the bill whose outer ends rise — the smile, mirrored.
Folded wings hang at the flanks with the primaries crossing low over the tail, which is what a perched corvid looks like head-on.
Feet splayed, three toes each, short because they are foreshortened.
Idle head motion is a slow sway (mascot-sway, ±1.8°) rather than the profile's look.

One wing per side — the wing state¶

Each view's constructor takes a per-side wing state, and draws that side either folded or spread, never both:

bird(near=SP(24, 146), far=FOLDED)          # profile:  near/far
bird_3q(near=SP(-52, 150), far=FOLDED)      # 3Q:       near/far
bird_front(left=SP(186, 172), right=SP(-6, 172))   # front: left/right

FOLDED draws that side's folded wing, SP(angle, span, droop, origin) draws a spread one from the same shoulder, and None omits the side entirely. The halo pass switches with it, so a spread wing takes its side's envelope out of the silhouette too.

Why this exists. The first version of the three-quarter and front views drew the folded wings unconditionally and added the spread ones on top, so pass, warn, fail, kitday and every action pose had four wings — a raised pair and a folded pair. Routing all of it through one per-side state is what makes that unrepresentable.

The spread wing's shoulder matches the folded one's (profile (296, 232); 3Q (338, 218) / (198, 234); front (192, 230) / (320, 230)) and its halo deliberately excludes the arm bar, so the limb reads as the same wing moved rather than a second one stuck on.

In the profile view a folded far is only the sliver that clears the body — the envelope redrawn behind the torso, offset up and back — never a second full wing. The strict-profile poses (base, pause, print, screen) leave far=None: from the side the other wing is genuinely hidden, and poking a sliver out would be wrong.

The tally's markers are derived from the wing path constants, not retyped: hand-copied prefixes went stale the moment an envelope was re-drawn, and the guard silently passed a wingless front view.

gen_mascot.py tallies the wings of every file it writes and exits non-zero if a pose has more than two, or has a spread wing without exactly two in total. helper (two birds) and badge (a head crop) are the two declared exceptions.

The spread wing¶

spread_wing(angle, span, flip, origin, droop) builds an extended wing, and every pose that holds, raises or spreads a wing calls it. Rotating the folded wing was the earlier approach and it read as a striped sleeve: covert stripes running along a constant-width tube.

Arm bar from shoulder → elbow → wrist, tapering, at the leading edge.
Primaries fan out of the wrist over ~75°, with the angular spacing wider than the feather width so the tips have visible gaps. The fan is what makes the wing broaden toward the tip.
Secondaries fill the inner trailing edge between elbow and wrist, blunt-tipped, behind the primaries.
Coverts are a short shingled band on the leading edge only — three rows, greater → median → lesser. The sheen rides the median and lesser band and nothing else.
Alula at the wrist on the leading edge, a small K3 lobe.
flip puts the trailing edge on whichever side points downward; it is derived from the angle (cos(angle) >= 0) unless overridden. droop adds degrees to the primaries so the tips hang — that is what makes the fail shrug rueful.
The fan's halo is the thin width (6) and covers primaries, secondaries and alula but not the arm bar: the bar has to merge into the shoulder, and a halo around it makes the wing look detached.
origin moves the shoulder. fail uses it to set the far wing back and up so both wings read in a side profile, where a truly symmetric shrug would hide one behind the body.

wing_tip(angle, span) returns where the outermost primary lands, for hanging a prop on it.

Expression¶

The bird is friendly, not stern. Four pieces, all in head_art / eyelid:

Gape — the mouth line runs back along the jaw and hooks up at the hinge (M326 202 … 392 181), so the bill reads as a slight smile rather than a straight slot.
Upper lid — a shallow K1 crescent crops the top ~20 % of the eye disc. Enough to soften the stare; any deeper and the bird looks sleepy. No rim line on it — a stroke there reads as a monocle.
Cheek catch — a small #3A4559 lozenge behind the gape at 0.5 opacity. Small: at illustration size a larger one reads as a bruise.
Head tilt — bird(tilt=N) rotates the head N degrees bill-up about the neck pivot (300, 200), and rotates the head's halo shapes with it so the rim stays aligned. Positive is up.

Tilt	Poses
+1 … +7 up	base, gather, check, print, screen, base-3q, pass, tip, helper, hexkey, caliper, point, carry, cable, badge
0	warn (serious), pause (asleep), the front view (no tilt hook — it sways instead)
−5 down	fail (rueful)

The Champion's cues — Revali¶

The bird is named Revali, after the Rito Champion in Breath of the Wild. Two cues carry the lineage, drawn into the shared constructions so every adult pose inherits them; the anatomy under them (feather rows, bristles, hackles, wedge tail) is untouched, and it is a homage, not a copy — no emblem, no bow, no arrows, nothing traced.

Cue	Construction	Where it lives
Champion's scarf	`scarf_band()` — the loop round the neck, base `SCARF` with a lit upper fold and one shadow crease; `tail()` — two strips from a `knot()`, each a `flow()` polyline (a bow plus one S-wave) tapered by `ribbon()`	`SCARF_PROFILE` / `SCARF_3Q` / `SCARF_FRONT` and their `*_TAILS` tables
Braided nape feathers	`braid()` — a tapered `K2` strand rimmed `#46536C`, four chevrons for the weave, a `SCARF` tie at 86 % and a three-feather tuft past it	`BRAIDS_PROFILE` / `BRAIDS_3Q` / `BRAIDS_FRONT`, drawn first in each `head_*()` so the skull hides the roots

Per view:

Profile. The band sits on the side of the neck and goes down before the wing, so the shoulder coverts overlap its back end; the tails go down after the wing and stream back over the mantle, rising, with the knot at the back of the neck under the braid tips. Asleep (closed=True, the pause pose) there is no updraft: SCARF_TAILS_ASLEEP droops them, short, clear of the nightcap's tassel.
Three-quarter. The band wraps the base of the neck over the ruff, whose points spill out below it (the band is kept narrow for that reason). The knot and tails leave from the far shoulder, where the back of the neck is in this view. Braids hang beside the far cheek. The fledgling (juv=True) gets neither cue — it is not the champion.
Front. Head-on the tails cannot stream behind, so they hang from a knot beside the bill, short, over the breast; braid tips show either side of the neck. warn keeps them: a scarf is not a gag prop, and the stop-sign silhouette is unchanged.
Badge. The band only, as one blue stroke under the chin, and a single braid with the weave dropped (braid(simple=True)). The tails would be sub-pixel at 30 px, so the badge has none.

The tails are the one nod to Revali's Gale — his self-made updraft — in cloth rather than in swirl lines. They take the thin halo (6), like the legs and the spread-wing fans: at their width the body rim would turn them into pale sausages. Braid halos rotate with the head (rotg) so the rim stays on the art under tilt.

Voice. Captions may lean toward Revali's self-assured, slightly smug register — proud of his own work, never at the reader's expense, and still dry and ≤ 18 words. The humour rule below is unchanged: he is never funny on ⚠, and FAIL stays sympathetic.

Halo¶

The bird has no dark outline. A halo pass draws the outer silhouette shapes (torso, skull, bill, wing envelope, primaries, tail, hackle points, legs) filled and stroked in #EDF0F4 before the art, so the union reads as a pale rim on Material's slate (#1e2129). Stroke is 10.5 for the body, 6 for the legs — wider and the bird looks like a sticker, narrower and it vanishes on dark.

Only groups that move relative to the halo may rotate, and only by a degree or two, otherwise the art slides off its own rim.

Layers and their animation roles¶

Every animated group carries an invisible full-viewBox <rect> first. That fixes its fill-box bounding box to the viewBox, which is what makes transform-origin px values mean user-space coordinates. Remove the rect and the origin silently moves.

Class	Holds	Idle motion
`.m-body`	everything	breathe, `scaleY` 1.013 over 4.2 s, origin at the feet
`.m-head`	skull, bill, bristles, eye	slow look, ±2.2° over 9 s
`.m-eye`	eye disc and highlights	blink, `scaleY` .08 for ~70 ms every 5.4 s
`.m-tail`	rectrices	tail-set, 1.4° over 11 s
`.m-wing`	folded wing rows	static when idle; the `.wave` one-shot rotates it
(spread wings)	`spread_wing` fans	static — they sit outside `.m-wing` so the fan never slides off its rim
`.m-leg-lift`	near leg, `pass` only	foot lift every 7.6 s
`.m-prop`	tray, magnifier, caliper, reprint arrow	per-pose bob / raise / turn
`.m-zz`	the three sleep marks	drift up and fade, 4.6 s
`.m-bulb`	the `tip` bulb	flicker
`.m-chick`	the fledgling	hop
`.m-layer`	the printer's first layer	`scaleX` .04 → 1
`.m-tick`, `.m-flap`	PASS tick, carton flaps	pop, wobble

All of it is inside @media (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference); with motion off every file is static and complete. .still on the root kills animation regardless. .wave is a one-shot greeting (wing + head) for a page that wants the bird to say hello on load.

Never put an animated class and a transform attribute on the same element. A CSS transform animation overrides the attribute outright and the element jumps to the origin. place() exists to keep positioning on an outer group and animation on an inner one.

Palette¶

Role	Hex	Used for
`K0`	`#0E1116`	primaries, lower mandible, far leg, deepest separations
`K1`	`#161A21`	body base, skull, near leg
`K2`	`#222A38`	mantle, greater coverts, hackles
`K3`	`#30394B`	nape, crown, median and lesser coverts, breast edge
Edge	`#2B3341` / `#3C465A`	feather separation strokes — the brighter one only in the dark tail/primary mass
Sheen	`#4C7FD3` → `#2A6FB5`	the one permitted gradient, id `sheen`, crown and wing coverts only
Halo	`#EDF0F4`	the silhouette rim, closed eyelid
Eye	`#0E1116` + `#FFFFFF`	dark eye, white highlight — the brightest thing in the file
Prop blue	`#2A6FB5` / `#DCE9F6`	spool band, lens, nightcap, printer window, bulb
Hardware	`#5C6675` / `#E7E9EC` / `#B6BDC6`	tray, caliper, carton, magnifier ring, bulb base
Feather rim	`#333D50` / `#46536C`	the lighter fringe on a covert, drawn by `shingle()`
Barb / rachis	`#3C465A`	`plume()` strokes on flight feathers, at 0.5 opacity
Gape flange	`#6B7689`	the fledgling's pale gape, nothing else
Amber	`#D98324` / `#FBEBD3`	hard hat and the reprint arrow. Warn and fail only.
Green	`#2E7D32`	the PASS tick, nothing else
Scarf	`#1F4E9C` base / `#3A6DC4` lit fold / `#163B7A` crease, knot, edge	Revali's Champion scarf and the braid ties, nothing else. The base is the manual's accent blue — the printer's frame — so the character and the build share one colour. Flat, no gradient. Contrast: base 8.0:1 on white, 2.2:1 on the body and on slate — the lit fold (3.6:1 on the body) and the halo rim are what carry it on the dark theme; checked at 30 px on both

No other colour, no second gradient, no filters, no raster, no fonts, no scripts. Props carry finish but stay flat: hex drives on the screw heads, a tick scale on the caliper beam, a bevel ring and a knurled grip on the magnifier, and brand-neutral labels on the bin and carton — bars and blocks, never lettering, since the files carry no fonts.

Per-file budget is 80 KB; the set currently peaks at 61 KB (helper, which holds two birds).

Sizing¶

Size	Use	Rule
≥ 160 px	page illustration	the detailed poses in all three views; feather rows and props resolve here
30–48 px	inline badge	`mascot-badge.svg` only — head and shoulders, three hackle scallops, one big eye, the scarf band as one blue stroke

The detailed poses do not survive 48 px: the feather rows mush and the props become grey specks. That is what the badge file is for. Keep the square viewBox; scale with width/height, never crop, never re-colour with a CSS filter.

Humour rule¶

Dry and kind, and rationed.

The bird never makes the mistake. It watches, checks, shrugs alongside you, points at a lightbulb. It never breaks a part, never drops a screw, and is never the butt of the joke.
Never funny on ⚠. Mains, hot end, blade, magnets, anything that can hurt a person or scrap a part: the hard-hat pose only — no smile, no gag prop, no tilt. If a page's warning is serious enough to need the bird, the bird is serious too.
FAIL is sympathetic. A shrug and a spool to print again. No tears, no facepalm, no red, no "oops". The gate failed, not the builder.
No speech. No bubbles, no captions, no puns in <title>. The manual's words carry the meaning; the bird is punctuation.
One mascot per page maximum, and no mascot at all on a page whose job is a number.

File naming¶

mascot-<pose>.svg, lowercase, pose in one word. Previews are preview/mascot-<pose>-light.png and -dark.png at 512 px, plus preview/mascot-badge-48.png. A new meaning is a new file — never repurpose an existing pose, because the map below is how the next pass will place them.

Where each pose belongs¶

A proposal for the next pass. Nothing in the manual references these files yet. VIEW_OF in the generator is the authority on which view a pose is in, and it asserts against POSES at build time.

File	View	The moment	Proposed placement
`mascot-base.svg`	profile	the manual itself	Home, beside the title
`mascot-badge.svg`	3Q head	the manual speaking, inline	48 px in the site header and beside field labels
`mascot-check.svg`	profile	verifying before moving on	the Check field's badge, and a chapter that ends in a measurement
`mascot-gather.svg`	profile	staging parts before a run of steps	the generated Gather for this segment block
`mascot-pause.svg`	profile	stopping for the night	`Pause:` boxes, the Tonight planner, overnight plates
`mascot-print.svg`	profile	watching a first layer	print-batch overview headers, slicer setup
`mascot-screen.svg`	profile	firmware and software	Ch 12 flashing, Ch 13 first startup
`mascot-base-3q.svg`	3Q	the bird, turned to you	any page about the two of you rather than the machine
`mascot-pass.svg`	3Q	a gate clears	the gate-calculator PASS verdict panel
`mascot-fail.svg`	3Q	a gate does not clear	the same panel's FAIL state
`mascot-tip.svg`	3Q	a shortcut worth knowing	`Tip:` boxes, one per chapter at most
`mascot-helper.svg`	3Q	a step that wants two pairs of hands	the `Helper:` badge, the "With a helper" section
`mascot-hexkey.svg`	3Q	tightening a fastener	Ch 01 squaring, and any step whose verb is tighten
`mascot-caliper.svg`	3Q	reading a measurement	test cubes, belt spacing, gate numbers
`mascot-point.svg`	3Q	"look at this one"	Do lines that single out a part, diagram callouts
`mascot-carry.svg`	3Q	sorting	the bin-label page, per-chapter sorting diagrams
`mascot-cable.svg`	3Q	low-voltage wiring	Ch 10. Signal connectors only
`mascot-base-front.svg`	front	the bird greeting you	Home; carries the `.wave` one-shot
`mascot-warn.svg`	front	safety, not caution	Ch 00a mains safety, and the one or two `⚠` boxes that can hurt someone
`mascot-kitday.svg`	front	the day a carton lands	Home's kit-day step, the B00 Gen-2-first note, Ch 00 unpacking

Deliberately absent. There is no pose for mains, soldering iron, blade or hot chamber. Those steps get no mascot at all — see the humour rule. mascot-cable.svg is low-voltage signal wiring only: a connector and its tail, never a stripped conductor, never a mains lead.

How to place them, when that pass happens. Step pages under docs/manual/steps/ are generated by scripts/build_steps.py; never edit them. Art goes into the chapter markdown, or into the hook that renders the block it belongs to (hooks/callouts.py for the callout badges, hooks/gatecalc.py for the verdict panels) so every generated copy inherits it. Placement must not touch step ids, and a mascot image line must stay outside the budgeted fields — it is not part of a Do or Check run. Add one .mascot / .mascot--badge rule to docs/stylesheets/extra.css rather than sizing each image inline.

Reference the SVG, not the preview PNG: CSS animations inside an SVG do run when it is loaded through <img>, which is how a Markdown image line loads it.

Regenerating¶

python3 scripts/gen_mascot.py docs/manual/assets/mascot --preview

Rewrites all twenty SVGs and re-renders the preview PNGs (512 px light and dark, plus the badge at 48 px) with rsvg-convert. #1e2129 is Material's slate page colour. Check a new pose at 48 px on both backgrounds before committing it; that is the size that fails first.