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.
The body stood in an A-pose while the log said the clip was playing. Two
independent defects, found by querying the imported asset instead of guessing:
1. PlayAnimation needs the component in AnimationSingleNode with a live
single-node instance. The body is hidden at construction and only unhidden by
the camera toggle, so the first call could land before the component was ready,
and the Wanted == PlayingAnimation guard then returned forever. UpdateBodyAnimation
now sets the mode, calls SetAnimation + Play, and re-asserts while the instance
is missing.
2. The arms-down offsets lived only in the clip keys. The exporter writes clip data
relative to the rest pose, so they arrived as a ±20 degree swing around an
A-posed bind - which is exactly what the pose probe measured. apply_base_pose now
bakes them into the rest pose before any clip is authored, the same trick
mpfb_character_export.py --pose idle uses. The table is applied with inverted
signs: as written, the FBX axis mapping produced arms raised in a V.
Shot 6 confirms it: the arms hang at the sides. Still open and recorded - the idle
pose reads awkwardly (arms forward, hands splayed) and the walk clip has no shot in
motion; both are marked in TODO.md and Screenshots/README.md.
Instrumentation removed; the diagnostics that remain are behind
gigline.SetupLogs.
One pawn, both rigs (ADR-9): a skeletal body hidden in first person, a
collision-tested spring arm, and a toggle that swaps the active camera and the
body's visibility. Shipped default stays first person; -thirdperson starts the
pawn in the third-person rig so the review shot is reproducible, and the
screenshot run passes it.
Three defects found and two fixed:
- The skin material had no SkeletalMesh usage flag, so Unreal silently substituted
the default grey. That is why the body rendered as clay.
- render_screenshots.sh still called ./Engine/... on this branch (the fix lives on
the facade branch and never reached main); applied here so the shots generate.
- OPEN: the idle clip is bound and PlayAnimation is called - the run logs the clip
name - but the body still renders in bind pose, arms out. Recorded with that
evidence in TODO.md rather than called done.
Shot 5 (demo-third-person) added and documented; camera collision is implemented
but unproven, since the spawn has open space behind it.
Two parametric cycles authored at 30 fps instead of hand-keyed poses, so the loop
closes by construction: GigLine_Idle (60 f, breathing sway, feet planted) and
GigLine_Walk (30 f, one stride, hip 0.45 rad / knee 0.55 / arm 0.32, arms
counter-phased, torso counter-rotation).
The limb axes were measured, not assumed: a probe rotated upperleg01.L by 0.5 rad
on each axis and read foot.L, which moved -0.022 -> +0.362 in Y on X, twisted on Y
and abducted on Z. Using the wrong axis here would have produced a character
scissoring sideways, which no import error would have caught.
The character export preset now bakes animation. Without bake_anim the exporter
writes a static bind pose and Unreal imports a mesh with no AnimSequence and no
error, so the importer asserts a clip exists and prints VERDICT: PASS/FAIL.
Verified in /Game/Test/Character: Idle 1.967 s and Walk 0.967 s, both AnimSequences,
skeleton intact. Playback on a possessed pawn is not yet verified: the demo pawn has
no visible body, so that check belongs with the third-person camera item.
- mpfb_character_export.py: new --pose idle folds the A/T-bind arms down to
a relaxed standing rest pose (baked via pose.armature_apply before export);
new make_diffuse synthesizes a warm skin-tone diffuse with a darker
shorts-suggestive band, replacing the Cycles v2-skin bake that came out
black and was slow at 1024^2.
- write_png now encodes from img.pixels via numpy (fast) because img.save()
writes black for an in-memory image.
- Re-exported idle character, re-imported to /Game/Test/Character (138 bones,
warm M_Character_Export/T_Character_Diffuse); removed stale T_Skin_Diffuse.
- Untracked the review PNGs again: the Screenshots/ gitignore rule had been
dropped and the parallel session had committed the PNGs, against the
AGENTS.md 'never commit the PNGs' rule. Restored the ignore rule; only
Screenshots/README.md stays tracked.
- README/roadmap/memory updated; review-01-character re-pended for approval.
zwitschi