MakeHuman head prototype

Status: owner-accepted head, assembled prototype, not yet shipped. The owner accepted the basic human head on 2026-11-04. The automated vision gate still records REJECT on the eye/lid region as deferred polish. The asset is a standalone head/neck extracted from the CC0 MakeHuman base in tmp/npc-research/makehuman/base.obj; the assembled path now adds hair, a hidden scalp trim and the procedural body. The 12 shipped GLBs have not been rebuilt with it yet.

Asset

GLB: assets/models/blender_src/makehuman_head.glb
Review sheet: blender_previews/sheet_makehuman_head.jpg
Source workflow (development-only): tmp/npc-research/build_makehuman_head.py — extracts the MakeHuman head, cuts it at the neck, keeps the head/eye/mouth components, cuts an almond aperture through a skin eyelid mask, adds recessed eyeballs with flat iris/pupil discs, anchors brows to the face surface, renders front/three-quarter/profile and exports the standalone GLB.
Measurements (final standalone build, inspect): 12,641 triangles / 7,690 split vertices; bounds approximately x ±0.094 m, y -0.180…0.042 m, z 1.530…1.803 m in project Z-up space.
Assembled npc_casual --head mh: 14,753 triangles / 12,823 seam-split vertices / 14 bones / 9 materials, inspect clean. All 12 variants count 14,693–15,987 triangles with the same head.
Materials used: skin, eye_white, iris, pupil, hair. No textures are baked into this prototype.

What was done

Imported the CC0 MakeHuman base OBJ and cleared the importer axis rotation.
Applied the project scale/axis transform: 1.82 m body, Z-up, metres, front −Y.
Cut the head at the neck (z ≈ 1.53) rather than keeping the cut shoulders; capped the neck opening.
Built an eyelid mask by subtracting an almond aperture from a skin sphere centred on each eye (solver = "EXACT"), then recessed the globes so the cornea sits behind the lid plane.
Added flat iris/pupil discs on the globe axis; disabled backface culling so the discs stay visible at three-quarter angles.
Anchored brow strips to the skin with object-space ray casts and added a shallow supraorbital ridge so they do not float, then reduced the crown height to improve the profile silhouette.
Fixed a material-remap bug introduced by joining the extra eye objects: the joined head faces were pointing at the eye_white slot, making the whole head render as white clay. The largest connected component is now forced back onto skin after the join.
Rendered front/three-quarter/profile views in a neutral review studio and exported the standalone GLB.

Provenance

Base mesh: MakeHuman / MPFB base, CC0, from the local research set tmp/npc-research/makehuman/; see CREDITS.md.
The head is a derived prototype, not a shipped NPC. It does not enter assets/models/blender/npc/, npc_base, the runtime NpcAvatar path, CI, or a release package until the NPC overhaul plan accepts it.
Source photographs/proportions are not used as textures here; this is a geometry-only head built from the researched model data.

Review criteria

Accept only if:

the head reads as human at front/three-quarter/profile and the neck is a clean head/bust silhouette, not a shoulder cut;
eyes, brow, nose, mouth and ears are readable without spikes, holes or floating shells;
the asset is inside the character budget and has no script/contract violation;
the prototype remains clearly local and un-integrated until the part pipeline is approved.

Judge result

Owner verdict: ACCEPT (basic human head, 2026-11-04). Automated vision gate: REJECT (vision judge z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, final standalone build render set above). The eye/lid findings below remain deferred polish; they are no longer a rollout blocker because the owner accepted the head.

Blocking findings:

P0 — globe depth is inconsistent across views. The front/three-quarter reads still show a bead-like iris with a pale sclera halo, while the profile reduces the eye to a brown sliver. The judge reads this as a faked recess rather than a socketed globe under a lid.
P0 — no convincing lid overlap. The iris remains nearly circular in front and the upper lid does not visibly clip the globe; the skin lid mask reads as a crater around a bead.
P0 — iris orientation reads decal-locked at three-quarter, so the gaze appears to drift off the head axis.
P0 — the aperture/lid mask is too circular and lacks medial/lateral canthi, so the eye still reads as a doll eye at portrait distance.

Should-fix findings:

the brow tubes are better anchored but the medial ends still detach in three-quarter/profile;
nose lacks a defined tip/wing and nostrils;
mouth is a faint geometric seam with no lip volume;
crown/back-of-skull is still faceted and egg-like in profile;
the catchlight is baked geometry and is not consistent between eyes.

What passed: the skin/eye material remap is correct, the eye openings are closed, the standalone GLB reports 12,641 triangles / 7,690 split vertices, and an assembled npc_casual with this head passes inspect at 14,753 / 16,000 triangles, 12,823 seam-split vertices, 14 bones, no issues.

Known limits: bald mannequin-like presentation, stylized geometry-only iris/pupil, no rig, no UV texture pass, and the neck cap is a review cut rather than a body-welded seam.

Assembled prototype (2026-11-04)

_makehuman_head imports the GLB and adds a skull-conforming hair cap derived from the closed head shell (scaled shell + boolean front-sphere cut + decimate). Hair skips the old hair_normal.png because the skull UVs produced large dark tangent patches.
Head faces fully covered by the cap are deleted to recover ~950 triangles; boundary faces stay as a safety band, so the accepted face geometry is untouched. The hidden neck plug uses 12 segments.
The procedural body was narrowed at the neck and shoulders (chest 0.158, neck base 0.060, neck top 0.054, shoulder root z 1.345) and its skin decimate dropped to 0.21 so all 12 variants fit the 16,000 cap.
Local review renders: tmp/npc-parts/prototype_mh/renders/ (portrait front/three-quarter/profile and full-body front/three-quarter).

Deferred polish

Replace the radial lid mask with real upper/lower lid masses that fold over the globe, with pointed canthi, and pass the profile view.
Move the iris onto a curved cornea cap so its orientation follows the globe at three-quarter angles, and use a lighting-driven catchlight instead of baked white geometry.
Refine the hair cap silhouette (current short cap reads as a helmet) and improve the full-body shoulder/arm shape before the 12-variant rollout.
Add a clean UV/material pass and a contract armature/weights when the head becomes part of the shipped library characters.

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