Nicholas ButzkeandClaude Opus 5
daf9627ece
Everything about getting an anime-styled character into the game — import, stylization, the body/garment/hair separation, rigging, retargeting, cloth and hair physics, and how to measure any of it — collected into .claude/skills/character-pipeline/. Organised around the principle the Hoyoverse-class pipelines are built on and that every failure in this project traced back to: a character is not one object. It is a body, a set of garments and hair, authored and rigged separately and moved by different systems. The body is skinned and animated; the garments and hair are bone chains the animation never touches and physics moves. The skill's non-negotiables are the four ways that separation has been destroyed here before — joining meshes, keying cosmetic bones, skinning cloth to a leg, and running the auto-rig repair on authored weights. references/verification.md leads with the trap that invalidated every cloth measurement ever taken in this repo: Godot restores bone poses after the modifier pass, so a tool that reads them afterwards measures the animation and never sees what any modifier did. Also records what is known-unsolved, with numbers: peak cloth clipping in a run/slide/dash, no foot IK, no strafe clips. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
72 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
# Stylization — the cel-shaded look
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Two passes, applied at load in `SkinnedPlayerModel.load_model`:
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```gdscript
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LevelMaterials.apply_toon_recursive(scene) # world-wide toon shading
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LevelMaterials.apply_character_look(scene) # character-only corrections
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```
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## The trap: imported models bring their own line-work
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Anime models exported from MMD/VRoid/Blender toon setups very often ship the
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outline **as geometry** — an inverted-hull shell of the mesh with a flat black,
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UNTEXTURED material, plus separate flat cards for the eye whites, irises and the
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pupil highlight. The mesh you import is not just the character; part of it is
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already the drawing.
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Toon-lighting that shell is what put a **white rim on every hair strand**. It is
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an inverted hull whose normals face away from you; a lighting model that adds a
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rim term lights it brightly exactly where it is supposed to read as ink.
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`apply_character_look` therefore treats **any untextured surface on a character**
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as the model's own line-work and handles it flat and unshaded:
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- **Outline hull** → made fully transparent rather than deleted. Deleting a
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surface would renumber the rest and break the mesh's own skin bindings. The
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game draws its own outline.
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- **Eye cards** (`resource_name` starts with `eyes`) → flat ink, except anything
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with `HL` in the name, which is the glint in the pupil and really is white.
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If a newly imported character comes out with a white halo, or with black eyes
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that should have irises, this function and its name-matching are where to look —
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the naming conventions vary by source and this is the one place they are read.
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## Materials on import: the unlit problem
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Anime glTFs are very often exported "unlit": `KHR_materials_unlit`, a **black**
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`baseColorFactor`, and the real texture wired to `emissiveTexture`. Renderers
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honouring the unlit extension use base colour and ignore emission — so Blender
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reads black, never references the images, and imports with `bpy.data.images`
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**empty**. The character comes out a silhouette, and there is no node graph left
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to patch afterwards.
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`tools/gltf_fix.py` rewrites the container **before** import: emissive becomes
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base colour, the unlit flag is dropped. It must run first — this is the first
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thing `retarget.py::main` does, before `import_any`.
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`fix_unlit_materials(meshes)` then repairs anything left inside Blender.
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## What the toon pass does
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`apply_toon_recursive` gives everything the game's banded ramp. `apply_character_look`
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then softens the banding on characters, because re-banding an already-shaded
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anime texture reads as gloss — the texture already contains its own shading and
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the second pass fights it.
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## Convention alignment
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The Hoyoverse-class look is, broadly: a ramp texture indexed by NdotL for the
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body, a separate ramp and often a dedicated shader for the face, an inverted-hull
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outline whose width is vertex-colour-modulated, and specific handling for eyes
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and hair highlights. This project does the simplified version — one banded ramp
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plus a screen-space-ish ink treatment, and the model's own outline shell hidden
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in favour of the game's. The face is NOT specially shaded here; if a character
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comes out with harsh shadow shapes across the nose, that is the missing piece.
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## Outline thickness
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Lives with the toon material in `scenes/maps/level_materials.gd`
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(`CHARACTER_INK` and the outline settings). This is the branch it was last
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touched on — `feat/outline-thickness-and-tp-weapon-hold`.
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