feat(vehicle): the car renders, built from the owner's hot hatch template

The invisible-vehicle defect is closed. Shot 9 now shows the car instead of an empty road.

Tools/vehicle_from_template.py converts Art/blender/vehicle/hot hatch.blend into UE-ready
assets, following two skills:

  vehicle-artist - systems split (body 113k tris, trim 10.5k, glass 20.5k, lights 18.6k,
  wheels 47.8k), one UCX_ hull 1.45 x 3.94 x 0.76 m, two decimated LODs at 39.7k and 13.6k.
  unreal-export - scale normalised to a documented 4.05 m hot hatch before export (the
  template measures 7.26 m, factor 0.5579), then verified after import: body bounds
  1.51 x 4.02 x 1.22 m against the 4.05 m target.

Staged as five plain StaticMeshActors, because the earlier probe proved those render while
the same meshes attached to the vehicle pawn do not.

Open and recorded rather than hidden: judge_screenshot returns verdict=no confidence=0.9 -
the silhouette does not read as a hot hatch from this angle and the car floats slightly.
The likely causes are a system misclassification in the template conversion and an
origin-height error of a few centimetres.

Art/characters/blueprints/blueprint.json

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+{
+  "character": "GigLine walker",
+  "description": "lean adult pedestrian, short dark hair, olive skin, plain navy t-shirt, dark jeans, worn sneakers",
+  "model": "juggernautXL_ragnarok.safetensors",
+  "views": {
+    "front": {
+      "file": "Art/characters/blueprints/front.png",
+      "seed": 101,
+      "prompt": "GigLine walker, lean adult pedestrian, short dark hair, olive skin, plain navy t-shirt, dark jeans, worn sneakers, full body front view, neutral standing pose, arms at sides, even studio light, plain light grey background, character sheet",
+      "negative": "multiple people, crowd, text, watermark, signature, blurry, low quality, cropped limbs, extra limbs, deformed hands, cartoon, anime, logo",
+      "prompt_id": "ff81a0c1-e4d7-4740-9310-806c11600539"
+    },
+    "side": {
+      "file": "Art/characters/blueprints/side.png",
+      "seed": 202,
+      "prompt": "GigLine walker, lean adult pedestrian, short dark hair, olive skin, plain navy t-shirt, dark jeans, worn sneakers, full body side profile view, neutral standing pose, arms at sides, even studio light, plain light grey background, character sheet",
+      "negative": "multiple people, crowd, text, watermark, signature, blurry, low quality, cropped limbs, extra limbs, deformed hands, cartoon, anime, logo",
+      "prompt_id": "cdd0bfac-446b-4c5a-8375-37fb5c70a75e"
+    },
+    "back": {
+      "file": "Art/characters/blueprints/back.png",
+      "seed": 303,
+      "prompt": "GigLine walker, lean adult pedestrian, short dark hair, olive skin, plain navy t-shirt, dark jeans, worn sneakers, full body back view, neutral standing pose, arms at sides, even studio light, plain light grey background, character sheet",
+      "negative": "multiple people, crowd, text, watermark, signature, blurry, low quality, cropped limbs, extra limbs, deformed hands, cartoon, anime, logo",
+      "prompt_id": "069bc59d-93bb-41ce-a95b-f5b2e8194982"
+    },
+    "head": {
+      "file": "Art/characters/blueprints/head.png",
+      "seed": 404,
+      "prompt": "GigLine walker, lean adult pedestrian, short dark hair, olive skin, plain navy t-shirt, dark jeans, worn sneakers, head and shoulders portrait, front view, neutral expression, even studio light, plain light grey background",
+      "negative": "multiple people, crowd, text, watermark, signature, blurry, low quality, cropped limbs, extra limbs, deformed hands, cartoon, anime, logo",
+      "prompt_id": "39ab3ba6-5e6f-4a69-bdbb-b2faf4318dc0"
+    }
+  },
+  "contact_sheet": "Art/characters/blueprints/contact-sheet.png",
+  "note": "generated locally by Tools/comfyui_character_blueprint.py; record the model licence in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md before shipping"
+}

Art/textures/generated/T_Character_Hair.json

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+{
+  "tool": "Tools/generate_character_textures.py",
+  "asset": "T_Character_Hair",
+  "size": 512,
+  "procedural": true,
+  "meta": {
+    "strands": 190,
+    "base": [
+      44,
+      32,
+      26
+    ],
+    "highlight": [
+      96,
+      74,
+      58
+    ]
+  },
+  "note": "generated, not photographed; no third-party licence"
+}

Art/textures/generated/T_Character_SkinDetail.json

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+{
+  "tool": "Tools/generate_character_textures.py",
+  "asset": "T_Character_SkinDetail",
+  "size": 512,
+  "procedural": true,
+  "meta": {
+    "octaves": {
+      "fine": 96,
+      "mid": 24,
+      "broad": 7
+    },
+    "detail": 9,
+    "tint": [
+      222,
+      178,
+      152
+    ]
+  },
+  "note": "generated, not photographed; no third-party licence"
+}

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -8,6 +8,69 @@ Format: [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/) style, versions follow [
 
 Nothing yet.
 
+## [0.2.3] — 2026-11-09
+
+Camera collision worked in the code and never in the game.
+
+### Fixed
+
+- **The third-person boom never shortened.** The spring arm was created with `SetAutoActivate(false)` and `ToggleCamera()` activated only the camera. A deactivated spring arm does not tick, and its collision probe runs in that tick, so the boom could not shorten no matter what stood behind the pawn. Both `ToggleCamera` and `BeginPlay` now activate the arm with the rig.
+
+### Added
+
+- **`-cameratest`** — backs the pawn against a spawned 2 m wall, waits for the boom, and reports the shortening, whether the boom ends inside geometry, and a back-trace from camera to head. It writes `review-demo-camera-collision.png` so the placement can be checked by eye.
+
+### Verified
+
+- With a wall 4 m behind the pawn the boom shortens from 340 cm to **288 cm** — 12 cm clear of the wall, matching the probe size. Recorded as a release check.
+- 8 review shots verify; 95 tool tests pass.
+
+### Notes for future work
+
+- **A spawned static-mesh actor has no collision unless it is deferred.** Setting the mesh and collision profile after `SpawnActor` produced a wall that blocked nothing (`blocks trace=0`) on three consecutive attempts. `SpawnActorDeferred` → set mesh and collision → `FinishSpawning` builds the physics state correctly.
+- **`TargetArmLength` is not rewritten when the boom shortens.** The spring arm applies the shortened length to the camera, so the measurement must be the camera's distance from the head; reading the property reports the requested length and looks like a failure.
+
+## [0.2.2] — 2026-11-09
+
+The character becomes a character: clothed, haired, and measured against a generated blueprint instead of judged by eye.
+
+**Version note:** this ships as a patch by the owner's decision even though it adds asset categories, which the release policy otherwise puts in a minor release. Recorded here so the numbering is not mistaken for scope later.
+
+### Added
+
+- **Clothing** — navy tee, dark jeans and off-white shoes as three separate skinned meshes (`Tools/character_clothing_build.py`), built from the body's own faces per the `character-artist` workflow: duplicate faces, solidify for cloth thickness, one mesh per piece. Each imports with its own single material slot and is attached as a leader-pose component.
+- **Hair cards** (`Tools/character_hair_build.py`) — a scalp cap plus 26 cards in three overlapping rows, quads only, every vertex weighted to `head`. Cards are oriented from the scalp normal at their anchor, so the cut follows the skull instead of standing out as spikes.
+- **Character blueprints** (`Tools/comfyui_character_blueprint.py`) — front, side, back and head views generated by the local ComfyUI instance from one description, with fixed seeds and a JSON record of prompts and prompt ids.
+- **Blueprint comparison** (`Tools/character_match.py`) — figure aspect, fill and coverage deltas, mean CIE76 and dominant-palette distance, plus a side-by-side montage. The deltas stay separate on purpose: one similarity number between a photoreal sheet and a low-detail body would mean nothing.
+- **ComfyUI driver** (`Tools/comfyui_generate.py`) and **procedural textures** (`Tools/generate_character_textures.py`), each writing a provenance sidecar.
+- **Material builder** (`Tools/ue_character_materials.py`) — `M_Character_Skin` and `M_Character_Hair_Mat` built from scratch, because `unreal.MaterialEditingLibrary` segfaults in a headless commandlet when it rebuilds an existing graph.
+
+### Changed
+
+- **The sun was raised** from pitch -62 to -74. The character stood in building shadow lit almost entirely by the blue sky light, so warm skin sampled as blue-grey — face (99, 98, 100) before, (131, 121, 117) after at the same camera.
+- **The walk cycle starts at maximum stride**, so the deterministic stride capture lands on the stride rather than on one of the two frames where the legs pass together.
+- Cloth shells are fattened 8 mm along their own normals after solidify; 1 cm of solidify let the body through at shoulders, hips and knees.
+
+### Fixed
+
+- **Hair read blond and thin** because the strand sheet's pale RGB drove base colour; the sheet now supplies only the opacity mask, and the colour is a dark constant.
+- **Garment coverage holes** at shoulders, hips and knees, closed by 2 cm solidify plus the normal fatten.
+- **A crash of my own making:** binding materials in `Tick` with `ConstructorHelpers::FObjectFinder` is fatal outside a constructor. Moved to `BeginPlay` with `LoadObject`.
+- **Shots 6, 7 and 8 were documented as an unclothed body** after the appearance changed; the README now matches the render and all eight shots are approved.
+
+### Verified
+
+- 8 review shots verify; **all eight approved** by the owner 2026-11-09.
+- Blueprint comparison improved from mean ΔE **31.9 → 21.8** and palette ΔE **25.4 → 19.7** once the character was clothed.
+- 95 tool tests pass (13 new for the colour maths, masks and palettes).
+
+### Known limitations
+
+- **The garments are still shells over body faces**, not simulated cloth: no wrinkles, no drape, and no separation from the body in motion.
+- **`T_Character_Diffuse` cannot be used.** Sampling it renders the body black, so the MPFB mesh's UVs do not map onto that bake; skin is a constant tone and the generated pore sheet is unwired.
+- **The character has no face detail** — the eyes, mouth and brows are mesh and lighting only, and read as a mannequin at close range.
+- **Camera collision remains implemented but unexercised.**
+
 ## [0.2.1] — 2026-11-09
 
 Rig fixes. Two defects from the `0.2.0` review, both fixed against measurements taken on the rig rather than against guesses.

Docs/release-checks.md

@@ -42,6 +42,7 @@ Measured at 1440p on the development workstation: Bazzite, Ryzen 7 7700X, 64 GB
 | `0.1.0` | Placement vs references | PASS (with deliberate simplifications) | Section below, 2026-11-08 | 2026-11-08 |
 | `0.1.0` | Collision and packaging | PASS — no blocking collision, no invisible walls, no seam gaps (see audit note) | `-qaselftest` on the packaged build, 2026-11-08 | 2026-11-08 |
 | `0.1.0` | 60 FPS at 1440p | PASS — 2.42 ms avg (414 fps), p99 3.01 ms at 2560×1440, TSR on, VSync off, no FG | `-qaselftest` perf capture, `Docs/perf/0.1.0-walk-frametimes.csv` | 2026-11-08 |
+| `0.2.3` | Third-person camera does not clip through geometry | PASS — with a 2 m wall spawned 4 m behind the pawn the boom shortens from 340 cm to **288 cm** (12 cm clear of the wall, matching the probe size). `-cameratest` logs it and captures the placement | `UnrealEditor-Cmd <uproject> /Game/Hollywood/DemoMap -game -thirdperson -cameratest`, `Saved/Logs/GigLine.log` | 2026-11-09 |
 | `0.2.0` | 60 FPS at 1440p | PASS — 2.64 ms avg (379 fps), p50 2.54, p95 3.39, p99 3.76, max 4.05 ms at 2560×1440, TSR on, VSync off, no FG | `-qaselftest` perf capture, `Docs/perf/0.2.0-walk-frametimes.csv` | 2026-11-09 |
 | `0.2.0` | Debug overlay cost | PASS — same route with the F3 overlay drawn: 2.77 ms avg (361 fps), p50 2.64, p95 3.52, p99 3.87, max 4.43 ms; about **5 %** heavier, still 6× the floor. The overlay is on for `-perf`/`-qaselftest`, off in the built demo | `Docs/perf/0.2.0-walk-frametimes-overlay.csv` | 2026-11-09 |
 | `0.1.0` | Fresh checkout build | PASS — clean clone of `main` (`4bc41e9`), `git lfs pull` + `check-lfs.sh` OK (130 LFS files), both `GigLineEditor` and `GigLine` targets built with the documented engine | `/tmp/fresh-check`, 2026-11-08 | 2026-11-08 |