The 3D view
A crop sprite is never seen flat in the game. It is drawn on four vertical planes in a hash pattern (or two diagonal planes for flowers), lit, cut out at 50% alpha and seen from above and at an angle. A sprite that looks right flat can read as a smear on the model, and a sparse one can look full. So TextureScript judges crops in 3D.
What it draws
view and shoot render a scene with deepslate, using
the game's own block models read from your jar: the crop and cross models, the game's
directional face shading and its alpha cutout. Your .stages files are compiled in memory and
pushed to the page, so an edit to a grid shows up on the next save.
It does not draw biome tint or smooth lighting. Check the final art in the game.
Why vanilla is next to it
Judging in isolation drifts. A crop that looks fine alone may be twice as dense as wheat, or a different green from every other plant in the world. Planting vanilla wheat or a sunflower next to your crop gives a scale and a reference for colour, density and silhouette. The vanilla blocks come from your own jar at run time and are never written to disk.
Why screenshots
view is for a person at a screen. shoot renders the same scene in a headless browser, from
several angles and variants, into one sheet. That makes the 3D judgement available to an agent,
which can look at the image, and to a reviewer, who can see before and after side by side. One
angle hides overlaps, so a sheet usually has two or three.