The first card build anchored every card on a fixed outward vector, so the silhouette
was a spiked crown. Each card is now oriented from the scalp normal at its anchor: the
length runs along the downward tangent, the width across it, and a small tip lift gives
the cut volume. Three overlapping rows (7/9/10) replace the single ring; overlap is
what stops cards reading as separate spikes.
26 cards, 401 verts, 224 quads, 468 tris, still all quads on one head bone.
Recorded as still open: the skin renders darker than the baked diffuse suggests, and
the generated pore and strand textures remain unwired because the material-editing
tool segfaults in the headless commandlet.
Follows the character-artist skill on two points it is explicit about: hair for a
game character is a card system, and swappable parts stay separate meshes.
- Tools/character_hair_build.py builds SM_Char_Hair: a scalp cap plus 18 cards in
three rings, quads only, every vertex weighted 1.0 to the head bone, UV-mapped for
the strand sheet from Tools/generate_character_textures.py. 321 verts / 404 tris.
- Tools/ue_character_hair_import.py imports it as its own skeletal mesh, which is the
point: joined into the body, Unreal collapses the second material slot and the hair
renders with the skin material.
- The pawn carries it as a second USkeletalMeshComponent on SetLeaderPoseComponent, so
it follows the head bone with no second rig and hides with the body in first person.
Still wrong and recorded: the cards point outward, so the silhouette reads as a spiked
crown rather than a short cut. The next pass orients them tangentially along the
skull with a second overlapping row. Tools/ue_character_materials.py also segfaults in
the headless commandlet when editing a material graph, so the generated textures are
not wired yet and the hair keeps its Blender base colour.
zwitschi