Solidify thickness went from 1 cm to 2 cm and the shell is fattened 8 mm along its own
normals afterwards. That closed the shoulders, hips and knees where the body was
showing through the cloth.
Evaluation against the blueprint, same shot and box before and after:
mean deltaE 31.9 -> 21.8
palette deltaE 25.4 -> 19.7
aspect delta 1.24 -> 1.22
Also fixes a crash I introduced: binding the materials in Tick used
ConstructorHelpers::FObjectFinder, which is fatal outside a constructor - the game died
with 'FObjectFinders can't be used outside of constructors' and the render run failed
with signal 11. The binding now lives in BeginPlay and uses LoadObject.
Not fixed, and recorded: the arms and face still render neutral grey, so
M_Character_Skin itself is suspect rather than the assignment.
Follows the character-artist clothing workflow literally: duplicate the body's own
faces for the garment base, solidify for cloth thickness, and keep each piece a
separate mesh. Attached as leader-pose components beside the hair, so no second rig.
- Tools/character_clothing_build.py builds three garments from the body mesh, trimmed
geometrically (height band plus a width limit) instead of by dominant bone: the bone
filter left holes wherever a face's strongest bone was outside the allowed list.
- Tools/ue_character_clothing_import.py imports them as CharacterTee / CharacterJeans /
CharacterShoes, each arriving with its own single material slot.
- The pawn attaches all three, hidden with the body in first person.
Three traps recorded in MEMORY.md, each of which cost a build: MPFB weights its helper
geometry to groups that dominate every vertex, Blender refuses to apply a modifier to a
mesh with shape keys, and object-mode polygon selection is discarded on entering edit
mode - the delete wiped the whole garment.
Known defects, in TODO.md: the garments have coverage holes at shoulders, hips and
knees, and the hair reads light and wispy since its material was repointed to the
masked strand sheet.
Two tools that turn character work into something measurable.
- Tools/comfyui_character_blueprint.py generates a four-view sheet (front, side, back,
head) plus a contact sheet from one description, with fixed seeds and a JSON record
of prompts and prompt ids. First sheet: 'GigLine walker', lean pedestrian in a navy
tee, jeans and sneakers.
- Tools/character_match.py compares a rendered character against a sheet: figure
aspect, fill and coverage deltas, mean CIE76 colour distance, dominant-palette
distance, and a side-by-side montage. The deltas stay separate on purpose - a single
similarity score between a photoreal sheet and a low-detail body would be a number
with no meaning.
- comfyui_generate.py grew wait_for_image() so both tools share the polling path
instead of duplicating it.
- 13 unit tests for the colour maths, masks and palette; 95 tool tests pass.
First real result, recorded rather than smoothed over: aspect delta 1.24, fill delta
0.12, mean deltaE 31.9, palette deltaE 25.4. The montage shows the reason - the model
is a nude body and the blueprint wears a tee and jeans, so clothing dominates every
metric. Figure segmentation is explicit (--render-box): auto-detection picked backdrop
blobs on every attempt, and a background plate is the proper fix.
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.
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.
A top-left readout for performance work: smoothed FPS and frame time, the worst
frame in a rolling two-second window, the active view, player speed, a frame
counter and the player's position in metres from the project origin.
- F3 toggles it, through the console variable gigline.Debug so a packaged build can
be checked without a rebuild (IA_ToggleDebug).
- On automatically for -perf and -qaselftest, so a performance capture never depends
on pressing a key first; off in the built demo, because a player should not see an
FPS counter over Hollywood Boulevard.
- The first two seconds are a warm-up window excluded from the worst-frame figure.
Without it the readout showed "worst 400 ms" for a healthy run: the startup shader
and streaming hitches dominated the rolling maximum.
Measured cost on the self-test route at 1440p: 2.64 to 2.77 ms average, about 5 %,
still 6x the floor. The release-check number stays the overlay-off run; the
overlay-on series is committed beside it as
Docs/perf/0.2.0-walk-frametimes-overlay.csv.
Docs: controls (F3 row, overlay section, switch table), release checks (cost row),
architecture building block view (HUD and input list).
Shot 8 shows the body mid-stride in profile: legs apart, arms counter-swinging. The
traversal release check for 0.2.0 is closed with that evidence.
The reason earlier attempts froze on one pose was not the clip. A probe of the
single-node instance showed the clip advancing normally (assetTime 0.19 -> 1.03,
rate 1.0, playing) while the pawn's speed stayed 0 and the clip stayed Idle: the
call that enables walking sat in the shot sequencer's BeginPlay, which runs before
the player pawn exists, so the cast found nothing and silently did nothing. Moved
into the per-frame follow update, the same run logs walk=1 speed=28 clip=GigLine_Walk
and the stride appears.
Also: the walk expectation was missing from visual_targets.json after the earlier
retirement, so --verify was checking 7 shots while 8 were captured. Restored; 8/8
verify.
The shot actor can now photograph a moving pawn: a per-shot ShotFollow flag re-places
the camera every frame at a fixed offset in the pawn's frame, and the walk is driven
per shot (SetReviewWalk) with the pawn returned to spawn after a follow shot, so the
fixed-camera shots later in the list still find it in place. With that, the capture
stopped depending on where a 4.5 m/s pawn happened to be.
Two further bugs fixed on the way:
- the engine's screenshot folder is cleared before each run. The collect step copies
every review-*.png it finds in Saved/, so a shot retired from the camera list kept
reappearing with byte-identical content from an older run - which is how a walk shot
that was never captured looked like a captured one.
- UpdateBodyAnimation no longer calls SetAnimation every frame. Re-setting the same
clip restarts it, which freezes the body on frame 0.
What the deterministic capture then exposed: the walk clip is applied but does not
advance - every walking frame shows the same pose (arms forward, legs together). The
stride shot is retired again rather than shipped, and TODO.md names the next step:
log GetCurrentAssetTime across frames and check the imported PlayRate. The harness
stays wired for when the clip plays.
Shots 6 and 7 were re-rendered after these changes and still pass; 7/7 verify.
Screenshots 6 and 7 are approved, so the remaining 0.2.0 work is the traversal
release check. This adds the piece of harness it needs - `-walk` holds forward input
from the first frame, so the pawn actually crosses the sidewalk while the third-person
rig follows it - and records what that check still lacks.
A stride shot was attempted three times and removed: a fixed review camera cannot
catch a pawn moving at 4.5 m/s. Each attempt framed it at a different distance and
the last two missed it entirely, so shipping it would have been a broken shot with a
green verification. The TODO item now says the blocker is the capture harness (a
camera that tracks the pawn), not the game, and names where the shot goes back in.
The flag stays because it is what the traversal check will drive.
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 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.
Consolidated from the qa-input-collision-fix-0.1.0 work, applied onto main so
only the changes main genuinely lacks are carried (main already merged the
walkable-demo/collision work independently).
- fix(input): populate the UE 5.8 FInputMappingContextMappingData
DefaultKeyMappings field in ue_create_input_assets.py (the runtime reads
GetMappings()->DefaultKeyMappings.Mappings; the script previously wrote only
the deprecated 'mappings' array, so the cooked game had 0 runtime mappings
and every key silently did nothing — in packaged AND PIE). Regenerated
IMC_Default.uasset. WASD/mouse/Space/R/Escape verified working.
- fix(build): drop editor-only APIs that break the game target build —
UStaticMesh::PostEditChange() (GigLineAssetTools) and AActor::GetActorLabel()
(character ground probe). GigLine and GigLineEditor now both compile clean.
- tools: OS-level uinput input harness (input_emulation.py + input_test.py) and
run_pie.sh for PIE isolation; document the PIE-vs-packaged input test in
Docs/build.md. Removed the temporary SIM/EI/screenshot diagnostics from the
character.
The reported fall-through was a misdiagnosis: the player never fell. The
imported Terrain_DEM had only a bounding-box simple collision proxy, so a
downward trace anywhere in the block hit the terrain at Z 819 (the mesh
bbox max) and the street sat under an invisible 8 m lid. Standing on that
box looked plausible, which is why it read as working.
- add UGigLineAssetTools (C++): force CTF_UseComplexAsSimple on a static
mesh. UE 5.8 dropped bUseComplexAsSimpleCollision and Python cannot set
the flag; the builder also saves the asset, since the flag lives there
and a map-only save silently reverts it.
- spawn (-13336, -1150, 600): inside the carved corridor (the cut is a
10.7 m half-width around the road centreline), lands on the road at 456.
- fix ResetToStart returning to the mid-air PlayerStart captured in
BeginPlay: StartLocation is now captured on the first grounded frame.
- HighResShot 1280x720 instead of "1280 720", which is a multiplier.
- add -qaselftest: scripted walk/reset/pause on a core ticker plus a
swept ground transect. Results: walk 746 cm/2 s with Z steady, reset
0 cm from spawn, pause/unpause 1/0, transect 84 samples 0 holes.
- rebase onto main, keeping the frontage materials and placement fixes.
Tools/ue_build_demo_map.py builds /Game/Hollywood/DemoMap: sun, sky, the hero
facade on the building line, six site meshes imported with collision, and a
player start on the north sidewalk. Tools/ue_import_site.py imports the site
FBXs; terrain, road and sidewalks use complex-as-simple so a simple hull cannot
ramp over the kerbs. Art/blender/site/export_site_fbx.py exports one FBX per
object so each can carry its own collision.
Reset (R) and pause (Escape) join the character and the input context: reset
restores the spawn transform and clears momentum, pause is a real game pause that
releases the cursor. DefaultInput.ini captures the mouse on launch.
Three placement defects found by measuring the imported actors rather than
trusting the plan: the spawn was on the wrong sidewalk because the FBX flip
inverts north, a mirror I added to the exporter double-corrected an already
correct sidewalk, and the street meshes only carry part of the north walk - the
rest is terrain.
AGigLineCharacter: 1.75 m capsule, 1.60 m eye camera, 4 m/s walk, mouse look
scaled in degrees per second (no double DeltaTime), jump. Loaded ahead of a
Blueprint so the demo is playable with no assets wired by hand.
Tools/ue_create_input_assets.py builds /Game/Input headlessly: five 1D actions
and an 11-mapping context. One action per direction instead of per-key modifiers,
because modifier objects do not survive the save path here: a mapping's modifier
array serialises None, and dimensioning a 2D move with per-key axis masks would
need exactly those modifiers. The cost is four action assets rather than two.
Also adds a fourth review camera at eye height and documents it; its approval is
pending.
zwitschi