The character now stands naturally: arms at its sides with a soft elbow bend, hands
at the hips, feet flat. Both character shots confirm it, front and back.
The root cause was not the pose. The FBX importer had been silently refusing to
replace the existing assets: after changing the arm base from 1.55 rad to 0.55 rad
and rebuilding, the imported clip returned the IDENTICAL bone quaternion
(+0.006, +0.002, -0.179, -0.984). replace_existing=True was set and delete_asset
returned False even after chmod u+w, because the pawn's constructor hard-references
the clips. Importing under a new name (CharacterV2) created fresh assets and the
same probe then returned (+0.439, +0.898) — the rotation had landed. Every earlier
attempt had been invisible for this reason.
The rotation itself is measured, not inherited: sweeping it in Blender gives 0.55 rad
for arms down and clear of the body, 0.65 for straight down against the hip, 0.75 for
past vertical and into the torso. It lives in the clamp keys, not in the bind: every
bind experiment was impossible on this shape-keyed MPFB mesh or left Unreal showing
the old bind.
Remaining, for 0.2.2: the fingers splay from the bind, and the walk clip has still
not been captured in motion.
The character now stands with its arms at its sides instead of in a bind A-pose,
and there is a second camera to prove it: the third-person shot only ever showed
the pawn's back, so a front-facing pose defect was invisible in review.
demo-third-person-front camera on the road, ~6 m in front, looking back north
at the pawn; embedded in Screenshots/README.md as shot 7.
The pose work itself is a chain of measured findings, all recorded in TODO.md:
- clip data is exported relative to the REST pose, so arms-down offsets held only in
the keys arrived as a ±20 degree swing around an A bind;
- a rest-pose bake alone does not move the mesh: the MPFB mesh has shape keys, the
armature modifier cannot be applied while they exist, and the vertices stayed in
the A shape (X span unchanged at 1.051 m). Clearing the shape keys, baking the
deformation into the vertices and re-binding is what made bind and clips agree.
Not settled, and left as an open item rather than a claim: the base pose uses
inverted signs to compensate for the FBX axis mapping, the upper arms clip into the
torso, and the fingers splay. An aim-based pose module was written and then removed
- applied without the vertex bake it produced arms raised in a V, and a half-working
shared module is worse than none. The proper solve is 0.2.2: apply the standing pose
at character creation, then author clips against that bind.
zwitschi
