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.
The stride shot regressed twice for two different reasons, and only the second was
the clip. The walk cycle was authored on a sine, which is zero at both the start and
the middle of the cycle - exactly the two frames where the legs pass together - so a
deterministic capture at any phase near those frames read as a still. The probe
proved it: frames 0 and 15 carried identical hip rotations while 7 and 22 were the
stride.
The cycle now starts at maximum stride (cosine). Length, amplitudes, keys and loop
are unchanged; only the phase moved. demo-third-person-walk is back as shot 8 and
shows a genuine stride with the curled hands from 0.2.1.
8/8 shots verify.
zwitschi
