release: v0.2.2 — the character pass

Writes the 0.2.2 entry and prunes the section from TODO.md. The entry records that this
ships as a patch by the owner's decision even though it adds asset categories, which the
policy otherwise puts in a minor release - so the numbering is not mistaken for scope.

Contents: clothing as three separate skinned meshes, hair cards oriented from the scalp
normal, ComfyUI character blueprints and the render-vs-blueprint comparison, procedural
textures, materials built from scratch, the raised sun, and the walk cycle starting at
maximum stride.

Verified: 8/8 shots, all approved; mean deltaE 31.9 -> 21.8 against the blueprint; 95
tool tests. Known limitations listed rather than omitted - garments are shells over body
faces, the baked diffuse cannot be used because the mesh UVs do not map to it, and the
character has no face detail.

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -8,6 +8,47 @@ Format: [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/) style, versions follow [
 
 Nothing yet.
 
+## [0.2.2] — 2026-11-09
+
+The character becomes a character: clothed, haired, and measured against a generated blueprint instead of judged by eye.
+
+**Version note:** this ships as a patch by the owner's decision even though it adds asset categories, which the release policy otherwise puts in a minor release. Recorded here so the numbering is not mistaken for scope later.
+
+### Added
+
+- **Clothing** — navy tee, dark jeans and off-white shoes as three separate skinned meshes (`Tools/character_clothing_build.py`), built from the body's own faces per the `character-artist` workflow: duplicate faces, solidify for cloth thickness, one mesh per piece. Each imports with its own single material slot and is attached as a leader-pose component.
+- **Hair cards** (`Tools/character_hair_build.py`) — a scalp cap plus 26 cards in three overlapping rows, quads only, every vertex weighted to `head`. Cards are oriented from the scalp normal at their anchor, so the cut follows the skull instead of standing out as spikes.
+- **Character blueprints** (`Tools/comfyui_character_blueprint.py`) — front, side, back and head views generated by the local ComfyUI instance from one description, with fixed seeds and a JSON record of prompts and prompt ids.
+- **Blueprint comparison** (`Tools/character_match.py`) — figure aspect, fill and coverage deltas, mean CIE76 and dominant-palette distance, plus a side-by-side montage. The deltas stay separate on purpose: one similarity number between a photoreal sheet and a low-detail body would mean nothing.
+- **ComfyUI driver** (`Tools/comfyui_generate.py`) and **procedural textures** (`Tools/generate_character_textures.py`), each writing a provenance sidecar.
+- **Material builder** (`Tools/ue_character_materials.py`) — `M_Character_Skin` and `M_Character_Hair_Mat` built from scratch, because `unreal.MaterialEditingLibrary` segfaults in a headless commandlet when it rebuilds an existing graph.
+
+### Changed
+
+- **The sun was raised** from pitch -62 to -74. The character stood in building shadow lit almost entirely by the blue sky light, so warm skin sampled as blue-grey — face (99, 98, 100) before, (131, 121, 117) after at the same camera.
+- **The walk cycle starts at maximum stride**, so the deterministic stride capture lands on the stride rather than on one of the two frames where the legs pass together.
+- Cloth shells are fattened 8 mm along their own normals after solidify; 1 cm of solidify let the body through at shoulders, hips and knees.
+
+### Fixed
+
+- **Hair read blond and thin** because the strand sheet's pale RGB drove base colour; the sheet now supplies only the opacity mask, and the colour is a dark constant.
+- **Garment coverage holes** at shoulders, hips and knees, closed by 2 cm solidify plus the normal fatten.
+- **A crash of my own making:** binding materials in `Tick` with `ConstructorHelpers::FObjectFinder` is fatal outside a constructor. Moved to `BeginPlay` with `LoadObject`.
+- **Shots 6, 7 and 8 were documented as an unclothed body** after the appearance changed; the README now matches the render and all eight shots are approved.
+
+### Verified
+
+- 8 review shots verify; **all eight approved** by the owner 2026-11-09.
+- Blueprint comparison improved from mean ΔE **31.9 → 21.8** and palette ΔE **25.4 → 19.7** once the character was clothed.
+- 95 tool tests pass (13 new for the colour maths, masks and palettes).
+
+### Known limitations
+
+- **The garments are still shells over body faces**, not simulated cloth: no wrinkles, no drape, and no separation from the body in motion.
+- **`T_Character_Diffuse` cannot be used.** Sampling it renders the body black, so the MPFB mesh's UVs do not map onto that bake; skin is a constant tone and the generated pore sheet is unwired.
+- **The character has no face detail** — the eyes, mouth and brows are mesh and lighting only, and read as a mannequin at close range.
+- **Camera collision remains implemented but unexercised.**
+
 ## [0.2.1] — 2026-11-09
 
 Rig fixes. Two defects from the `0.2.0` review, both fixed against measurements taken on the rig rather than against guesses.

ROADMAP.md

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ Development roadmap for this project: milestone goals, scope, decisions, and rel
 
 ## Status at a glance — 2026-11-08 15:30
 
-Workstation, geo pipeline, and engine validation are done. The art pipeline has a first blockout, terrain, and street in metres, in one shared coordinate frame. **Project bootstrap is complete**: `Game/GigLine` builds, packages, and both content-acceptance tests (static-mesh scale, MPFB skeletal character) pass. **`v0.1.0` released 2026-11-08**: the walkable demo, hero façade, verified block frontage, first-person controls, ODbL attribution, and every release check pass (traversal, placement, collision, 60 fps at 1440p, fresh-checkout build, packaged build with controls). Next: the `0.1.1`–`0.1.4` patch series (collision detail, scale/façade corrections, packaging fixes, real building façades), **`v0.1.6` released 2026-11-09**: retail frontage for 6800 Lee Drug and 6806–6820 modelled from their own photograph; 6822 Budget deferred (no reference) and the lettering/parapet detail moved to `0.9.0`. **`v0.2.0` released 2026-11-09**: visible animated body, third-person camera with a V toggle, idle and walk clips, and a deterministic stride capture. Two cosmetic character defects (splayed fingers, a swept-not-derived base rotation) are deferred to `0.2.2`. **Next:** `0.3.0` (Chaos vehicle, enter/exit, closed driving route).
+Workstation, geo pipeline, and engine validation are done. The art pipeline has a first blockout, terrain, and street in metres, in one shared coordinate frame. **Project bootstrap is complete**: `Game/GigLine` builds, packages, and both content-acceptance tests (static-mesh scale, MPFB skeletal character) pass. **`v0.1.0` released 2026-11-08**: the walkable demo, hero façade, verified block frontage, first-person controls, ODbL attribution, and every release check pass (traversal, placement, collision, 60 fps at 1440p, fresh-checkout build, packaged build with controls). Next: the `0.1.1`–`0.1.4` patch series (collision detail, scale/façade corrections, packaging fixes, real building façades), **`v0.1.6` released 2026-11-09**: retail frontage for 6800 Lee Drug and 6806–6820 modelled from their own photograph; 6822 Budget deferred (no reference) and the lettering/parapet detail moved to `0.9.0`. **`v0.2.0`–`v0.2.2` released 2026-11-09**: visible animated body, third-person camera with a V toggle, idle and walk clips, a deterministic stride capture, and then the character pass — clothing (tee, jeans, shoes as separate skinned meshes), dark hair cards, generated blueprints and a render-vs-blueprint comparison (mean ΔE 31.9 → 21.8). **Next:** `0.3.0` (Chaos vehicle, enter/exit, closed driving route).
 
 | Area | State |
 | --- | --- |

TODO.md

@@ -9,28 +9,6 @@ Actionable task list for this project. This file is the single, central place fo
 - When all steps in a version section are done: write a `CHANGELOG.md` entry, then remove the version section from this file.
 - Release gate: a version is tagged only on the owner's explicit go-ahead once its release checks pass, not automatically when the checkboxes close.
 
-## 0.2.2 — Skin and hair tuning (patch)
-
-### Patch tasks - active - session-5598ce7e-27e3-4c64-bb49-c04a4a31ee58 (branch `anim-body-0.2.0`)
-
-- [x] Restore the stride capture after the pose rewrite. The walk cycle started on a **sine**, zero at both the start and the middle of the cycle, so the deterministic capture kept landing on the two passing frames where the legs are together. Starting the cycle at maximum stride (cosine) fixed it with no other change; `demo-third-person-walk` is back as shot 8 and shows a genuine stride.
-
-- [A] Tune skin shading and hair materials on the player character. **Blueprints and evaluation tooling in place 2026-11-09, hair blocked on an engine-side limit:**
-  - `Tools/comfyui_generate.py` drives the local ComfyUI instance (`127.0.0.1:8188`) for textures, writing a JSON sidecar with the model, prompt, seed and full workflow so anything generated can be regenerated or rejected. Installed models include `juggernautXL_ragnarok.safetensors` and `sd-v1-5-inpainting.ckpt`.
-  - **Stable Diffusion is not usable for flat skin swatches.** Three attempts on two models produced an anatomical close-up twice and a leather-scale surface once; SDXL has no reliable notion of "texture without anatomy". Skin detail is therefore generated procedurally instead (`Tools/generate_character_textures.py`: tileable octave noise for pores plus a strand-sheet texture for hair).
-  - **Hair is now its own asset** (`Tools/character_hair_build.py` → `SM_Char_Hair` → `/Game/Test/Character/CharacterHair`), which is what the `character-artist` skill asks for: cards are a separate mesh, not geometry joined into the body. It imports with its own material slot and is attached in C++ as a second `USkeletalMeshComponent` on `SetLeaderPoseComponent`, so it follows the head bone without a second animation. 321 verts, 192 quads, 404 tris.
-  - **The card layout now hugs the skull.** Each card is oriented by the scalp normal at its anchor — the length runs along the downward tangent, the width across it, and a small lift at the tip gives the cut volume. Three overlapping rows (7/9/10 cards, 26 total, 468 tris) replaced the single outward-pointing ring that read as a spiked crown. Overlap is what stops cards reading as separate spikes.
-  - **Skin still needs work.** `M_Character_Skin` (constant tone 0.62/0.42/0.33, roughness 0.58) is built and the pawn calls `SetMaterial(0, ...)`, but the body still renders neutral grey in review shots, so the assignment is not taking. The baked `T_Character_Diffuse` cannot be used either: sampling it renders the body black, so the MPFB mesh's UVs do not map onto that bake. Next: verify the slot index after `SetSkeletalMesh`, or assign in `BeginPlay` instead of the constructor.
-  - **Character blueprint and evaluation tools exist.** `Tools/comfyui_character_blueprint.py` generates a four-view sheet (front/side/back/head) from one description with fixed seeds; `Tools/character_match.py` compares a render against it and reports aspect, fill, coverage, mean CIE76 and palette distance plus a side-by-side montage. First result against `Screenshots/demo/review-demo-third-person-front.png`: **aspect delta 1.24, fill delta 0.12, mean ΔE 31.9, palette ΔE 25.4** — and the montage shows why: the model is a **nude body**, the blueprint is clothed (navy tee, jeans, sneakers).
-  - **Clothing exists now** (`Tools/character_clothing_build.py` + `Tools/ue_character_clothing_import.py`): tee, jeans and shoes as three separate skinned meshes, built from the body's own faces per the character-artist workflow (duplicate faces, solidify for thickness, one mesh per piece), imported as `CharacterTee` / `CharacterJeans` / `CharacterShoes` and attached as leader-pose components. The navy tee, dark jeans and off-white shoes read correctly at review distance.
-  - **Garment coverage fixed 2026-11-09.** Solidify thickness raised to 2 cm plus a normal fatten pass of 8 mm closed the shoulders, hips and knees; the tee, jeans and shoes now read as continuous cloth. Evaluation against the blueprint improved from **mean ΔE 31.9 → 21.8** and **palette ΔE 25.4 → 19.7**; the montage is `Art/characters/blueprints/match-front.png`.
-  - **Hair fixed:** the strand sheet now supplies only the opacity mask and the colour is a dark constant (0.030/0.020/0.014). Sampled in the render: hair (31, 26, 21) - properly dark instead of the washed-out blond it read as when the sheet's RGB drove base colour.
-  - **Skin colour explained 2026-11-09: the character stands in building shadow.** The material, the assignment and the tone were all correct; the body was lit almost entirely by the blue sky light (intensity 2.6), so warm skin sampled as grey-blue. Raising the sun from pitch -62 to -74 lifted the face from (99, 98, 100) to (131, 121, 117) and the arms from (67, 74, 81) to (71, 78, 85) at the same camera. **That is a lighting change affecting every approved shot, so it is on this branch awaiting the owner's approval, not merged.** Original note: A runtime log confirmed the slot holds `M_Character_Skin` (`slot0=M_Character_Skin slots=1`), and a deliberate red test colour reached the render - so binding works. But the intended warm tone (0.78/0.55/0.44) samples as **bluish grey** in the render: arms (67, 74, 81), face (98, 97, 100), while the tee and jeans show their colours correctly. Something between the constant and the final pixel is desaturating the skin - next suspects are the material's shading model/ambient occlusion from the body normals, or the render's key light being far dimmer on the body than on the ground.
-  - **Figure segmentation is explicit, not automatic.** Auto-detection failed on the review shots: the backdrop (sky band, pale wall, dark pavement) is larger and more saturated than the subject, so every size-based rule picked a backdrop blob. `--render-box` takes the figure box as fractions of the frame. A background plate rendered without the character would make this automatic.
-  - `Tools/ue_character_materials.py` (wiring the generated textures into the skin and hair materials) **segfaults in the headless commandlet** when it edits the material graph. Not wired; the hair keeps the dark base colour it carries from Blender. Needs either an editor-session run or a material asset built from scratch instead of edited in place.
-
-- [ ] Tag `v0.2.2` and write `CHANGELOG.md` entry; then remove this section.
-
 ## 0.2.3 — Camera clipping fixes (patch)
 
 ### Patch tasks