Tools/comfyui_generate.py drives the local ComfyUI instance for generated textures
and writes a sidecar with model, prompt, seed and workflow, so a generated asset can
be regenerated or rejected instead of being an unexplained PNG. Models list and
generation both verified against 127.0.0.1:8188.
Stable Diffusion is not usable for flat skin swatches, and that is worth recording:
three attempts produced an anatomical close-up twice and a leather-scale surface once.
Skin detail is generated procedurally instead - tileable octave noise for pores, plus
a strand sheet for hair - in Tools/generate_character_textures.py, with sidecars.
Hair geometry exists (cap conforming to the head, weighted to the head bone, second
material slot in Blender) but Unreal's import collapses the second material slot, so
the cap renders with the skin material and reads as a bald skull. It is behind
--hair and off; the next step is a separate skeletal mesh attached as a second
component.
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.
Two defects from the 0.2.0 review, both fixed and both measured.
- Fingers splayed because the bind is an A-pose hand. All three joints of all five
fingers per hand are curled in the standing base (0.28/0.34/0.22 rad), with the
curl axis probed on the rig first. The front shot now shows relaxed hands.
- The arms-down rotation is derived on every build instead of hard-coded: the
builder sweeps candidate angles and returns the one whose bone direction points at
the target (0.60 rad, direction dot 1.000 this build). The old 0.55 was a
hand-swept constant.
- Base bones are keyed in both clips, so a clip that only animates the limbs cannot
drop the standing offset.
Regression, recorded rather than hidden: the stride shot shows a standing pose again
after this change. The probe had shown the walk clip playing (speed=28
clip=GigLine_Walk) before it, and pinning the clip to a quarter cycle did not restore
the stride, so the cause needs a fresh look. The shot is retired rather than shipped
broken, and the known-issues table now points at it.
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.
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.
zwitschi