By
@xenoaitham
riggermortis Give your rigs a pulse. Hand it a rigged character and a reference a photo, a drawing, or a video and it poses or animates the rig to match. Free and local: no cloud, no accounts, no uploads.
10h 54m 53s logged
The proportion and volume sculpting work was measured and gated, but had no real user-facing path yet. That debt got paid: a new command line tool measures a reference image’s proportions and volume ratios into one deterministic file, and both the manual tool and the interactive in-app action now call the same shared function underneath, so they can’t quietly drift apart. The real proof was ordering: sculpt once at rest pose, then animate, and the sculpt has to survive byte-identically. It does, frame-one drift came out effectively zero across seventy checks.
Three real bugs earned their keep. First, two test rigs sharing one scene made solved values look wrong, the real cause was one fixture already carrying an earlier sculpt while the other’s baseline measurement accidentally captured the overlapping shape of both figures at once. Took a full debugging ladder to isolate, fixed with a clean scene per case, a lesson the project had already learned once before, now learned twice.
Second, baking an animation shifts frame numbers by one internally, so comparing a frame against its own neighbor instead of itself made results look dramatically worse than they actually were. A one-line offset fix, with the reasoning written directly into the check itself this time so it can’t get silently lost again.
Third, comparing raw bone positions across an animated sequence turned out to be the wrong check entirely, since a position-based re-solve is supposed to compensate for the current pose’s rotation by design, not match it exactly. Redefined what the check actually verifies, and caught a related bug along the way: an assigned animation silently overrides a rest-pose snapshot unless that animation gets explicitly muted first.
Landed with fifteen new tests, the full suite green, and every number comfortably inside its bar except one, a single rig type’s re-sculpt accuracy sits just barely over target, left as the next rough edge.
7h 53m 26s logged
The third model decision is made and the volume feature is real. The engine now carries a third pinned model, a segmentation pass, plus a working body sculpt: feed it a reference shape and the character’s hip, waist, chest, and thigh widths move to match it, skeleton provably untouched.
Getting there meant benchmarking five real candidate models on real hardware, checksums, speed, and accuracy each, rejecting six other families with the evidence written down. Funniest catch: the model built specifically for segmenting people was completely blind to the test case, zero accuracy, while the general-purpose model saw it fine and ran cheaper too. The mechanism authors real shape keys per body region, so the adjustable sliders are the solved math directly, and every pose/animation path downstream sees a completely unchanged skeleton.
The real fight was realizing the first passing test was a lie. A whole-frame comparison technically passed on a completely unsculpted body, since the measurement was too insensitive to tell a correctly sculpted shape from an untouched one. Fixed by scoping comparisons to the actual body regions with no model in the loop, publishing a baseline next to every result so a cheating pass can’t hide again. Smaller lessons banked too: a slider silently defaulting to zero killed half its usable range, one rig type needed its math in a different coordinate space entirely or it silently did nothing, leftover scene state poisoned later measurements, and naive bone-weight assignment broke the hip region specifically.
Numbers came out solid: worst-case regional accuracy clears the bar across every test case, width delivery lands exact to four decimal places, solved values track intended targets within about 3% through the real model, and resetting a sculpt restores the original mesh almost exactly.
Next: wire both sculpts into the real user-facing flow, and prove the sculpt survives animation, set once, then animate, and the widths hold.
