A third playable character, built with the pipeline skill from a source
that was already in the repo: the animation library ships a rigged
Mannequin mesh on the exact 53-joint reference skeleton, CC0, so it needed
no download and retargets perfectly. 18 clips, 0.3% cross-leg bleed, 7% of
verts at four influences — a clean authored-weight import. Licence
recorded in mannequin.license.json as the other skins do.
It has no cloth chains, correctly: it is a mannequin and has neither hair
nor clothes.
Importing it turned up two real bugs, both of which would have hit any
flat-coloured or single-piece model:
- LevelMaterials.apply_character_look treated ANY untextured surface on a
character as the model's own outline shell and hid it, so the mannequin
rendered as a solid black silhouette — its body and joint materials are
untextured flat colours, not ink. _is_line_work() now asks whether the
surface is named eyes*, is drawn front-face-culled (the inverted-hull
setup), or is near-black. Taila and Miku are unaffected: their materials
are textured and never reach that branch. Verified by render.
- verify_character.py failed the build for having one mesh. That check
cannot tell "the pipeline joined them" from "the artist authored one
mesh" — Quaternius' mannequin is one piece on purpose. It is advisory
now; the join path's two unambiguous signatures, cross-leg bleed and the
4-influences-everywhere spread, are still hard checks.
Also restored Miku's description, which the re-import had blanked.
3 GLB skins selectable (6 with the built-in colour skins). Smoke 0
failures, 11/11 movement tests, cloth idle 0.024-0.078 deg/frame.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Miku shipped with 0 cloth chains against Taila's 35, so her twin tails
hung off her skull like a helmet. Nothing downstream could fix it: the
spring solver simulates cloth BONES, and a garment with none is welded to
whatever body bone it was weighted to. Every auto-rigged model is in that
state, and her source was an unrigged mesh.
tools/cloth_bones.py builds them, which is the job a technical artist does
by hand on a model like this. It finds the geometry by MATERIAL SLOT — the
artist already answered which surface is hair, and on a joined mesh (what
the auto-rig leaves behind) the slot is the only separation left. Hair is
split into connected islands, because a strand is a connected piece of
surface and clustering by position would merge two ponytails passing near
each other. A skirt is split into radial wedges instead, because a skirt
is ONE connected surface and islands would return the whole thing as a
single piece — the bell-shaped failure. Each clump gets a polyline fitted
down its middle by binning vertices by distance and taking centroids, so
the chain follows the piece's own curve rather than cutting the corner on
a bend, and vertices are re-weighted onto it while the first 22% keeps its
original body weight so the scalp stays on the skull.
On Miku: 19 chains, 57 bones from one `hair` slot. Sidecar 0 -> 19 chains.
Idle stability 0.007-0.018 deg/frame. Mesh intact, verified by render.
Opt-in, via `pipeline.py --grow-cloth`, and run before the retarget so
describe_rig() finds the chains by name exactly as it would an artist's.
Known limits, recorded in the skill: it cannot find a garment sharing a
material with the body (Miku's skirt is on her `body` slot, so she got
hair and no skirt), and grown chains are a fallback — an artist's chains
carry intent that no geometric fit recovers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
New selectable skin: Taila (original anime character by Partaevil,
CC-BY, license kept alongside the model), cel-shaded with ink outlines,
running the full 18-clip animation set + the new rifle-hold pose layer.
Pipeline hardening learned the hard way (each of these produced a broken
character before the fix):
- tools/strip_rig.py: strips a foreign rig (VRoid/Mixamo names bake FLAT
clips in the name-based retarget), keeps only meshes skinned to that rig
(scene props were joining into the player model), recentres feet-on-origin,
and reroutes image textures into Principled base color for re-export.
- tools/unlit_to_pbr.py: KHR_materials_unlit anime models carry their albedo
in emissiveTexture over a black base — Blender 5.1 drops the texture on
import, rendering the character pitch black. Rewrites the GLB JSON to
standard textured PBR before Blender ever sees it.
Also dropped the Elle import attempt: her rest pose is seated (posed scene),
which the T-pose autorig cannot use.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Third-person player characters now animate every action with readable
intent (all networked, cel style preserved):
- Look-around: upper body follows the owner's camera pitch — distributed
over spine/neck/head so aiming up/down reads on the whole silhouette
(driven by the already-synced HeadPivot rotation on remotes)
- Reload: the baked PistolReload clip plays as a one-shot whenever the
equipped weapon starts reloading (local edge-detect poll -> new synced
action counter replays it on every peer)
- Grenade throw: new Throw clip baked from the library's overhead swing
(Sword_Attack retarget); triggers on throw, synced the same way
- Shot recoil: visible kick on the shooter's model (shoulders snap back,
forearms rise, fast decay) driven by the existing fire-effects RPC —
remote players' shots now look like shots
- Slide: trailing arm braces against the ground for balance on top of the
feet-first pose
- Armed idle confirmed in capture: weapon held at ready, not arms-down
Plumbing: synced_action/synced_action_seq added to all three player
spawners' replication configs; ACTIONS table on the model maps names to
clips + lock times.
Verified: 18 clips resolve (incl Throw), smoke 0 failures, movement
11/11, acoustics PASSED; third-person run + armed idle captures clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
- footbridge.glb: 18m truss footbridge over the central avenue one block
south of the rail line — X-pattern teal trusses, mesh railings, real
stair flights at both ends. Deck and stairs are WALKABLE (box deck
collider + invisible ramp colliders over the stair visuals): a third
elevated crossing route between the viaduct and the plaza, and a new
grapple anchor over the avenue
- platform.glb: station platform strips on the viaduct deck flanking the
crossing — canopy on posts, benches, line signs; dresses the deck route
players actually run
- Fixed a parse error from an undefined color constant caught by the
capture loop (blank render -> error -> fix -> verified)
Movement 11/11, smoke 0 failures; full-city aerial verified.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Second round of original Blender-kitbashed street furniture
(tools/build_hero_assets.py):
- yatai.glb: ramen cart — noren curtain strips on a hanger bar, counter,
wheels, three stools, paper lantern, red roof with ink trim; one at
every market mouth (wood collider)
- koban.glb: police box with teal roof, door, framed window, sign board
and red lamp — watches the central crossing from the SE plaza corner
- phonebooth.glb: green-framed glass booth on ~25% of retail corners
- busstop.glb: bench + glass canopy + yellow sign disc, alternating
blocks along the central avenue, both directions
- bicycle.glb: torus-wheeled bikes with frame/seat/basket, parked in
seeded rows of 2-4 beside building fronts
All toonified with ink outlines; colliders acoustics-tagged (wood/
concrete/glass/metal). Movement 11/11, smoke 0, acoustics ALL PASSED.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
First bespoke art authored for the project (tools/build_hero_assets.py,
headless Blender 5.1 -> assets/props/hero/):
- konbini.glb: 8m convenience-store front — fascia + teal sign band with
ink trim, framed windows with sills and window ads, recessed double
glass door, angled awning, drink machine, hedge planter. Placed on
~1/3 of wide buildings (glass-tagged collider)
- station.glb: viaduct station entrance — canopy on pillars, real stair
steps with handrails and balusters, sign totem; placed at the central
avenue crossing of the rail line
- clock.glb: 10m plaza clock tower — tiered base, ringed column, 4 clock
faces with hands, teal crown; anchors the south-west plaza cell
- torii.glb: proper torii with segmented curved kasagi, shimaki, nuki
beam and plaque — replaces the box torii in every shrine courtyard
(invisible pillar colliders keep gameplay identical)
All hero pieces run through the toon pipeline with fine ink outlines.
Every part beveled; flat cel palette matches the city.
Verified: city renders clean with hero pieces placed; movement 11/11,
smoke 0 failures, acoustics ALL PASSED.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The city's flat color sign panels are now real graphic designs, closing
the street-level "graphic density" that anime cities live on:
- tools/generate_ads.py: procedural ad library (24 textures) — bold
two-tone layouts (diagonal splits, bands, circles, stripes) with
fake-glyph text blocks that read as kanji/kana from gameplay distance,
inked borders, seeded palette system
- Every building gets 1-3 street-level posters plastered on its facade
- Vertical sign columns render a stacked-glyph column texture
- Rooftop billboards, tower crown boards (both faces) and the central
4-face screen tower all show distinct ad graphics
- Posters under the viaduct arches on every pier
- All panels lit (albedo + emission of the same texture) so they glow
as signage without blooming out
Verified via street capture (glyph posters, pharmacy-cross signs, ad
boards visible down the avenue); movement 11/11, smoke 0 failures,
acoustics ALL PASSED.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Audio:
- All ballistic weapons now fire real firearm recordings (The Free Firearm
Sound Library, CC0): AK-47 uses actual AK-47 shots, M4=AR-15, MP7=PPSh,
AWP=Mosin Nagant, DMR=Savage 10, shotgun=Mossberg/Nova, nailgun=Ruger .22,
rocket/mortar layered with real booms. Plasma keeps its energy sound.
- Reload is real lever-action foley instead of interface clicks
- Projectile flight loops localized: unit_size 50->6, max_db 6->0,
max_distance 45 — no more mortar/rocket drone in every player's ear;
loops also got proper loop_end (was a zero-length loop)
- Flight loops lowpassed into soft whooshes instead of sci-fi engine drones
- Menu music converted to OGG with native full-track looping (47s seamless,
replaces the broken manual WAV loop points)
Animations (movement-shooter pass):
- Rebaked miku.glb with 4 new clips from the CC0 library: Grapple (swim
reach — reads as a swing), PistolIdle (armed idle with weapon up),
PistolShoot, PistolReload
- Armed idle: standing with a weapon now uses PistolIdle instead of
arms-at-sides
- Slide pose overhaul: legs kick out front (lead/trail thighs, knees
straighten) — feet-first slide instead of "sitting in a crouch"
- Wall run: forward drive pitch + inner arm reaches out to the wall
- Per-transition blend times: dash/hit/jump cut fast (0.05-0.08s),
locomotion cross-fades smoothly (0.2-0.25s); CrouchWalk speed-scales
Fixes:
- Third-person camera no longer renders the first-person viewmodel layer
(the gun/arms floated in front of the third-person view)
Verified: 11/11 movement tests, smoke test 0 failures (17 clips resolved),
third-person run screenshot shows grounded animated model, no floating gun.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The model animated but deformed wrong: arms crossed the torso and foot heels
stretched to the model's center-bottom. Two root causes, both fixed:
1. Pose mismatch. Sketchfab models are modelled in an A-pose (arms angled
down) but the Quaternius library rests in a T-pose. Binding the A-pose mesh
to T-pose arm bones misweighted the arms, and the library clips (which
rotate arms ~70° down from the T rest) then shoved the already-drooped arms
across the body.
Fix: autorig.fit_arms_to_mesh() reorients each arm bone chain along the
model's real arm direction; merge_animations retargets every clip from the
library's T-pose rest onto the fitted rest via world-space constraint bake
(Copy Rotation/Location + nla.bake), so world motion is reproduced
regardless of the rest difference.
2. Feet-to-center stretch. The library's deform-flagged `root` bone runs up
the body centre-line; nearest-bone weighting assigned inner-foot/heel verts
to it, stretching them to center when animated.
Fix: exclude root/control/mechanism bones from weighting (_NON_DEFORM_HINTS).
Also upgraded nearest-bone weighting from rigid (1 bone/vert) to a smooth
inverse-distance blend across the nearest 4 bones, so joints deform cleanly.
Bone-heat still fails on Miku's joined hair/clothing mesh, so this is the
primary path.
Verified by rendering Idle/Walk/Run poses (Blender): natural stance, arms at
sides swinging correctly, feet planted, proper running stride. Smoke test
still 30/30.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The model animated its skeleton but rendered a permanent T-pose: the mesh
wasn't skin-bound. Root cause was in autorig's binding, introduced while
chasing an earlier "skins:0" export:
- The earlier "skins:0" was actually caused by bone-heat weighting failing
(0 weighted verts → empty skin gets dropped), NOT by the Armature modifier.
- The "fix" then stripped the Armature modifier and used parent_type=ARMATURE.
That makes the glTF exporter emit a skin OBJECT but with no node.skin
reference and no per-vertex JOINTS/WEIGHTS — an orphan skin. The mesh then
renders its bind pose (T-pose) forever while the skeleton animates unseen.
Fix: keep the standard ARMATURE_AUTO result (Armature modifier + vertex
groups). With the nearest-bone fallback ensuring real weights, the exporter
now writes a COMPLETE skin (verified: meshnode.skin=0, JOINTS/WEIGHTS present).
Also:
- skinned_player_model: _ensure_meshes_bound() re-binds any skinned mesh whose
skeleton NodePath doesn't resolve at load — graceful degradation instead of
a silent T-pose for imperfect GLBs.
- smoke test now asserts the spawned player's mesh is bound to its skeleton,
so this class of bug fails the test instead of shipping. 30/30 pass.
- regenerated miku_test.glb with the corrected pipeline.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Verified the full chain on a real Sketchfab model (Miku UID -> rigged ->
13 clips -> loads and animates in-engine, 24/24 smoke checks pass).
Fixes found while running it for real:
- sketchfab_import: read .sketchfab_token as UTF-16/BOM too (PowerShell's
`echo >` writes UTF-16LE, which crashed the UTF-8 reader)
- autorig: rig to the animation library's OWN skeleton when _library.glb
is present (zero retargeting); robust binding — fall back to rigid
nearest-bone weights when Blender bone-heat fails on complex meshes
(Miku's joined hair/clothing gave 0 weighted verts); export as
parent_type=ARMATURE with no modifier (Blender 5.x only emits a glTF
skin in that exact form — a lingering Armature modifier gave skins:0);
export_apply=False (applying modifiers baked away the skin); flatten
the Sketchfab empty hierarchy before binding
- merge_animations: support a single multi-clip library GLB via
LIBRARY_CLIP_MAP; version-safe fcurve access for Blender 4.4+/5.x
slotted actions (Action.fcurves was removed)
Assets/tooling:
- bundle assets/characters/animations/_library.glb — CC0 Quaternius
Universal Animation Library (13 game clips), + .gdignore so Godot
skips the pipeline-input folder
- requirements.txt (stdlib-only; documents Blender-python separation)
- pipeline docs updated for the bundled library + swap instructions
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Character pipeline (tools/):
- sketchfab_import.py: search/download via Sketchfab Download API with
license/attribution tracking (SKETCHFAB_API_TOKEN)
- autorig.py: headless Blender auto-rig — fits a Mixamo-named skeleton
to unrigged humanoids, binds automatic weights
- merge_animations.py: merges the shared Mixamo-skeleton animation
library onto any rigged character, strips root motion, canonical names
- pipeline.py: one command chains download -> rig -> animate -> register
In-game skin system:
- SkinManager autoload reads skins.json (auto-written by the pipeline)
- SkinnedPlayerModel rewritten: canonical clips with fallback chains,
blend times, speed-scaled locomotion, weapon bone attachment
- First-person: full animated body for the owner, head hidden via
SkeletonModifier3D; third-person: full model for other players
- Skin selector in main menu; skin id synced in multiplayer
- Fixed GLBLoader crash (GLTFDocument.get_animation_count doesn't exist)
Multiplayer sync overhaul:
- Movement is now client-authoritative: the owning peer simulates
locally (no input round-trip), server keeps health/kills/death
- Remote players interpolate synced_position/velocity with
extrapolation and snap-on-teleport
- Knockback/impulses routed to the simulating peer
Audio:
- AudioManager autoload: SFX/Weapons/Footsteps/UI/Music buses, pooled
3D players, variation + pitch randomization, auto-registration from
assets/sounds
Docs: 3D_ASSET_PIPELINE.md rewritten end-to-end, new ASSET_SOURCES.md
(non-procedural animation/map/sound sources) and SOUND_DESIGN.md.
Verified with debug/spawn_smoke_test.gd (headless: 24/24 checks pass).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The Blender GLTF exporter was stripping animation tracks (only 1 of 51
channels survived export). Now SkinnedPlayerModel detects this at
runtime and creates a proper Idle animation programmatically using Godot's
Animation API with 5 bone tracks (Spine, Arms, Neck, Hips).
Also switched model_path back to miku_rigged_final.glb since the
re-export wasn't adding usable animations.
The twintails were moving as arms because the auto-rig script treated the
combined mesh as one piece. Now using the original miku_rigged_final.glb
skeleton (which has correct skin weights from the model creator) and
adding 6 new animations (Idle, Walk, Run, Jump, Crouch, Death) on top
of the existing skeleton.
- tools/add_animations.py: adds animations to an existing rigged GLB
- tools/rig_and_animate.py: updated to separate mesh into loose parts
before rigging (for future use with other models)
- miku_rigged_animated.glb: now 7 animations with correct skin weights
- Add miku_rigged_animated.glb (3.27MB) with 18-bone skeleton and 6 animations
(Idle, Walk, Run, Jump, Crouch, Death) via Blender auto-rig script
- Add tools/rig_and_animate.py: reusable Blender script for rigging any humanoid
mesh with Mixamo-compatible bone naming
- Update SkinnedPlayerModel: scale_factor, first-person mode, animation state
matching (Idle/Walk/Run/Jump/Crouch/Death)
- Update level_runtime.gd: use skinned model for local player, procedural
humanoid for remote players
- Update skin_manager.gd and test_level_builder.gd to use animated model
- Fix Godot 4.2.1 'is not Type' syntax in 5 weapon files
- Add editor/import_miku_to_tscn.gd for editor-based GLB import
