security-game/docs/npc-visual-review.md

NPC roster visual review — 0.9.9 signoff

Status: awaiting owner visual signoff. This page is the single review point for the Quaternius roster swap that shipped in 0.9.9 (ADR-0017, ADR-0018). Every character name the game ships is captured here at gameplay distance, in three studio views, and in the three animation poses the runtime drives.

Until this page is signed off, the roster swap is reversible: the procedural library and the MakeHuman head are still in the tree and still pass audit, inspect, npc_proportions and the tests (build --source procedural).

1. Full-body roster (12 roles)

One tile per shipped character, neutral studio, camera at 4.2 m.

2. Front and profile per role

Front row set, then profile. Use this to judge the silhouette, the head size and the gear placement without perspective hiding anything.

3. Animation poses (idle / sit / walk contact)

Six representative roles × three poses, driven by the real _animate() path with the FSM frozen. Check: arms hang instead of holding an A-pose, the seated pose puts the forearms on the thighs and keeps the shins down, the walk contact keeps limbs in contralateral opposition, and no limb pinches or detaches at the shoulder, elbow, hip or knee.

4. Crowd distance (8 m)

The distance the player actually sees a passer-by from the sidewalk.

Signoff checklist

Tick each row. Anything you reject is a concrete task rather than an opinion, so it can go straight into TODO.md.

#	Question	Verdict
1	Do the twelve characters read as distinct people at 8 m?	[x] yes [ ] no
2	Is the head size right for the body (no bobblehead, no pinhead)?	[x] yes [ ] no
3	Do the faces hold up at portrait distance?	[ ] yes [x] no
4	Do the hands and the hand-held gear (camera, cup, clipboard, sign) read correctly?	[ ] yes [x] no
5	Does the head gear (cap, hood, sunglasses, firefighter helmet) sit on the skull?	[ ] yes [x] no
6	Are the role outfits believable for a Hollywood-boulevard shift (tourist, delivery, guard, responder)?	[x] yes [ ] no
7	Are the seeded tint palettes acceptable, or too pastel/saturated?	[x] yes [ ] no
8	Do the seated and walking poses hold up?	[x] yes [ ] no

Signoff: [ ] approved as shipped [x] approved with the follow-ups below [ ] rejected

Issues visible in the captures

The first review pass found three body defects. All three came from the build pipeline, not the art, and all three are addressed in the second pass (2026-11-06):

Finding	Cause	Status
npc_guard has holes in the upper body	the build deleted the Worker_Vest material, and on the modular Worker the vest is the torso	fixed — the vest is now the cloth slot, tinted per role; nothing is deleted
npc_firefighter, npc_crowd_d have a broken shoulder/upper-body area	same cause, plus the deleted Worker_Yellow hat was the crown of the skull, leaving the head open	fixed — the hat/crown stays in the mesh and only the part above z 1.65 takes the hair tint
npc_guard, npc_vest, npc_crowd_d have one big unibrow	the Worker's Eyebrows material is one continuous bar, and no other upstream head has brows that fit this mesh	replaced — the bar is cut out and the hoodie's two brows are transplanted onto the Worker head, lifted above the eye quads
npc_dress, npc_jacket, npc_crowd_a, npc_crowd_d arms intersect the body	the baked rest aimed the upper arm straight down, which works on the wide bases but not the narrow ones	reduced — the arm now rests 7° out from vertical (mesh width 0.180 → 0.220 on casual, 0.228 → 0.262 on hoodie); a light clip remains on the worker bases

Follow-up pass (same day) went further on the Worker head, which still read as a hard hat under the bare tint:

Finding	Fix
crown still shaped like a hard hat	the hoodie's hair is transplanted onto the Worker head and the hat faces above the collar are cut away, so guard/responder/crowd_d have hair
the dark bar was the Worker's eye quads, not only the brow bar	the eye quads are removed too; the face now reads brows + moustache
performer cone swallowed the head, and the performer/protester props floated beside the body	_add_props() now parents carried props to the hand proxies and the cone shrank from a 0.44 m to a 0.25 m base

Re-verified after the fix with the sheets below and the vision judge: no holes or missing geometry on any of the three Worker-based roles.

Still open — checklist rows 3, 4 and 5 plus the list below: the Worker crown still reads as a hard hat because that is upstream geometry, the eye/brow mass still reads heavy at portrait distance, and the arms still graze the torso on the worker base.

Found by user:

1. npc_firefighter, npc_guard and npc_crowd_d have errors in the body:
   • npc_guard has "holes" in upper body
   • npc_firefighter and npc_crowd_d have buggy shoulder and upper body area
2. npc_guard, npc_vest and npc_crowd_d have one large unibrow: use other character's eyebrow geometry instead.
3. npc_dress, npc_jacket, npc_crowd_a and npc_crowd_d arms are too close and intersecting the body

Found while building this page; none blocks the swap, all are queued in TODO.md:

1. npc_dress wears the performer cone hat plus the protest sign because the performer props are procedural and scaled for the old body. The dress itself has no geometry anymore — the role is the casual base with a dress tint.
2. npc_coat and npc_hoodie are the hoodie base with a coat/hood tint; the raised hood and the long coat silhouette are gone.
3. The npc_vest clipboard reads oversized at 0.23 × 0.31 m on the shorter Quaternius arm.
4. The firefighter helmet brim is 1.55× the head width — realistic for the helmet, but it reads as a wide-brim hat next to the small head.
5. Skin and cloth read pale on the hoodie and worker bases; the seeded palette was tuned against the procedural library's darker cloth.
6. Roster variety is three meshes for twelve roles. Tint and gear carry the difference; the modular part library is the fix.

Measured facts for this build

Metric	Value
Characters	12, all on the Quaternius 62-joint rig
Triangles per character	4,458 (worker minus vest) … 6,424 (casual)
glTF vertices per character	9,370 … 13,440
Budget	24,000 tris / 24,000 verts per character
Tint slots	skin, cloth, pants, hair, accessory, plus fixed detail
Texel density	73–74 px/m on the 256² maps
Height	1.817–1.881 m
24-NPC frame budget	160,608 tris, 0.84 ms average frame (budget 50 ms)
Gates	inspect clean, audit 12/12, fit OK, Godot 278/278, Python 167/167

Reproducing the captures

godot --path . --script res://src/test/capture_npc_baseline.gd -- --out=res://tmp/npc-signoff
godot --path . --script res://src/test/capture_npc_pose.gd -- --out=res://tmp/npc-signoff-pose \
  --pose=idle          # repeat for sit and walk_contact

Superseded

This page previously carried the 0.9.4 procedural library baseline (eight hand-built characters, the face/hand/neck fixes, the 13-core proportion audit). That mesh no longer ships, so the text is retired; the comparison sheets stay in blender_previews/ as history: sheet_npc_baseline_compare-p1.jpg, -body.jpg, -torso.jpg, -face-detail.jpg, sheet_npc_hands_compare.jpg, sheet_npc_hands_grip_compare.jpg.

The current source evaluation and per-character build table live in npc-model-sourcing.md#shipped-roster-099-owner-chose-the-full-swap; the face options that led to the full swap are in screens/npc-face-gate/.