What CharForge makes now, and what fixing it took

A finer surface, filtered

The generator was asked for 200,000 faces, and simplifying to that turned gently curved armour into flat facets with sawtooth edges. Every later stage kept them - the solid is put back on the generated surface to keep its detail - so they reached the normal map as a triangle pattern under any grazing light. It now keeps a million faces, and the surface is filtered by bilateral normal filtering before anything is built on it: facets a few degrees apart become one surface, a plate's edge, tens of degrees sharp, stays. Quad remeshing refused our meshes outright.

The pose it was modelled in, as its rest

Every character was skinned up from the pose it was generated in to a T and saved in it, because the motion library's rest is a T. Skinning is linear blending and cannot be undone: Cadet's pauldron sheared into shards on the way up, and every arms-down frame came back down from that T with slivers. Now the T is only recorded, for the retargeting maths, and the rest stays as modelled. The clips are the same - foot slip identical in all nine gaits. Arms raised above the shoulder still stretch armour fused to the arm.

No loose shards

Every low-poly carried 2-94 floating shells of a few faces - where the modelled hands were unioned on, and where the decimation's repairs cut round bad edges - and they held nearly all its open edges. Pieces under a quarter of a percent of the faces are dropped now; a strand or a garment kept apart by design is hundreds of faces.

Hands shaded by their own shape

The modelled hands took their light and dark from a colour bake of the generated mesh - which has the old hand, or nothing, where the modelled one stands - so most hands carried pale and dark patches. They take it from their own ambient occlusion now: shade between the fingers, nothing elsewhere.

One skin

The skin's colour came from three places - the picture with its shading on the front, the generator's colours on the sides, one tone on the hands - so the same skin was three colours: a ring at every bare wrist, and on faces the picture's shading lying on a shape not quite the picture's. Skin, found by its hue and on the parts the parser calls skin, has its colour at the 1-2 cm scale of shading replaced by one tone and keeps its freckles and pores. It evens a face; it cannot move a feature onto the right part of one.

Backs painted by a multi-view model

Hunyuan3D-Paint 2.1 paints a mesh's views from its own normals, consistent with the picture and each other, and cleaned Pip's blotchy back. On eight more characters it invented what the picture does not show and lost fine pattern: at the 256 px this Mac can run it at, it guesses. It is an option now, used for Pip - and the texture audit, which scored it better, needs a likeness measure beside its cleanliness measures.

A head made on its own

The most visible fault left is the face. In a whole-figure model the head is a few dozen voxels across, and the picture is projected onto a face shaped unlike it: seen from the side, its features and shading slide off. Made again on its own from a close crop of the picture, the head has the picture's shape. It is placed on the body through the picture both were made from, replaces the old head above the neck, and the picture is projected onto it; joining and painting it cleanly is still in progress (--head hunyuan). The next chapter takes the generated face apart instead, and mends each part.

Eyes rebuilt as a smooth cap under the lids

The generator models every eye as an almond opening with shards inside it. The solid filled it with streaks, and the decimation, which gave the whole head 17% of 60,000 triangles, crumpled it into a pit - and no texture laid on a pit reads as an eye. More texels on the head changed nothing you could see. The openings are found by a pose model on the generator's own paint (on a grey render of a drawn face it only guessed), and rebuilt in the solid as a smooth cap across the opening that follows the lids and bulges a little like an eyeball under them - an eyeball set behind the opening left a slot that rendered as goggles. The head now keeps 28% of the triangles. Anime eyes the pose model cannot read stay as generated.

The face laid on in parts

The picture's face had been projected larger than the sculpted one, its eyes 10-30 pixels off, and the optical flow meant to line it up squinted and smeared them. Now each part - each brow, each eye, the nose, the mouth, the jaw - is moved by its own small fit onto the model's own features, and the moves are spread smoothly over the face. Two more sources of patches went: the generated side views, whose faces never sit quite where the picture's does, no longer paint the face; and the skin-evening step, whose colour bands cut the picture's soft cheek shadow into blotches, leaves the face alone.

The generator's colours without the crackle

Every surface the picture does not paint - the side of a face, an ear, the hair, the back - carried a crackle of short grey and dark lines. They were not holes in the mesh and not dark specks: the generator paints its colours into an atlas of thousands of tiny charts, and along their edges leaves texels sampled off the surface. Mending them from the atlas's neighbouring texels borrowed other charts' colours. Rebuilt through the mesh instead - each vertex given the median colour of its triangles, outliers given their neighbours', the atlas painted again at four times its size - the skin and hair come out clean.

A missing hand, a second face, holes in the back

You saw it at once and no measure had: five characters had no right hand. When one hand's join to the arm failed, it was attached as an overlapping shell, and the other hand's join, run on that tangled body, quietly returned it unchanged - the only check was that the body did not shrink. Every hand is now joined to the clean body first and checked by its fingertips, and a build with a missing hand stops. Vex had a second face sculpted on the back of her head, which the generator invented; every new model is now looked at from behind and made again if a face is there. And the cut that frees the arms from the body had run through eight characters' backs; what it took beyond the arm now goes back. The vision models in the local library can tell a hand from a stump every time, but asked for any defect they flag too much to be a gate - they say which close-ups to open first.

Twelve faces, before and after

The same twelve characters from the front, v0.12 beside v0.13. Landmark error alone missed the improvement - a smeared eye is still where an eye should be - which is why the likeness of each part is measured too. Still open: the hairline (the hair shell's ragged edge), anime eyes, and the face from the side, where it is still the generator's shape.

Pip's vest no longer lifts into wings

Three causes, stacked. The 3D model glued his arms to the vest's sides - now cut free below the armpit. The rig's rule that keeps an arm's weight on the arm floods the arm's own surface from the sleeve's outside, and it started at the very slab where the cut opens, where sleeve and vest are still one surface: it walked onto the vest on both arms and changed nothing. It starts a little lower now. Above the cut, the vest's armhole is the arm's surface and took half its weight, as any shoulder does; the vest's yellow and the sleeve's blue tell them apart, and the armhole now moves with the collarbone.

The cargo pocket that stood off his thigh like a plank: the part labeller calls it an accessory, and accessories rode the torso. Below the hip joints one now stays on its leg (off-thigh vertices in the landing 122 → 25).

Arms overhead

With both arms straight up the vest stays on his torso. What is left is the stretch between vest and sleeve at the armpit: they are one surface, and a surface joining a garment that stays to a sleeve that rises has to stretch somewhere. The fix for that is the vest as its own layer.

No garment carries another's paint

The patches looked like a projection error, and three rounds of fixes to the projection changed nothing. The cause was the UV layout: unwrapped on a smoothed copy of the mesh, islands folded onto themselves wherever it curls, and two surfaces painted the same texels - 1,529 faces on Pip, 2,602 on Vex. Repacking cannot part an island from itself; the overlapping faces are unwrapped again, finer each time, and every island brought back to one texel density (unwrapped alone, they took 42% of Pip's atlas).

Aoi's trousers lost their light streaks

Not the generated hands the modelled ones replaced (masking them changed 12,513 texels and left the streaks): in the generated side view her hands hang a little lower than the mesh's, and the trouser texels just past the mesh's hand read the picture's hand. A generated view now fades out beside the outline of anything nearer - a depth jump between neighbouring pixels. Not in the reference, which the mesh was made from: half of Aoi's face lies behind a lock of her hair.

The same pass found the modelled hands' region reaching into her hip (36,482 texels painted skin) and 161,553 texels of Pip: a texel is the hand's now only if it stands outside the body the hand was joined to.

Hands the colour of the face

The modelled hands took the median of every skin-like colour on the body - on Pip that is his orange hair, khaki shorts and the vest's shading as much as skin. The face's own texels decide it now.

A jacket's hem follows the hips, not the thighs

The lowest part of Pip's vest carried half its weight on his thighs (median 0.50), and spreading the legs in a jump pulled its hem into a W; Juno's windbreaker wrapped round her thighs in a squat. Where the torso's colours and the upper thighs' differ, the upper garment near the hips follows the pelvis, and a long jacket still rides on the seat below it; one colour top to bottom - Mara's olive and tan are 5 apart - nothing changes, and her kick still drags her jacket along the raised thigh.

Webs between an arm and the body - most of them a board

Waving stretched grey sheets from Knight's arms to his hips. Cutting thin webs out of the solid before the arm is freed took some (anything under about 9 mm goes, and pieces the cuts split off are dropped), but fins and a strap remained - because most of it was not a web: TRELLIS had built the picture's backdrop into his model as a board behind him (see Few-word prompts), and the later stages cut it into sheets. Made again through TRELLIS's own background remover, his model has no board, the web cut finds a fifth as much, and the sheets, fins and strap are gone.

Loose pieces ride with the body

Kaito's mesh came as 40 pieces: the body, the two modelled hands, and 37 bits the generator left detached - the inner toes of his split-toe boots, hair spikes. The weights follow paths through the body and never reached them, so they stayed where the rest pose left them. Each now rides rigidly with the body part nearest it.

Elbows no longer fold back through the arm

In her spell cast Aoi presses her hands together in front of her chest, elbows out. One camera cannot say how far a bone reaches toward it, so the fit takes each bone's depth from its length in the image - up to a sign - and it took the matched capture's side for her upper arm: tipped back. The elbow came out folded to 176°, the forearm back through the upper arm, and her jacket sleeves, which move with the upper arm, stuck straight out sideways past the fold. The hand score caught it: the pose model read those sleeve ends as her hands.

The fit now chooses an upper arm's side and its forearm's together. An elbow folded past 150-160° costs - the motion library's pass 150° in 0.05% of frames - and so does a wrist within the chest's width and height put behind the torso, as 1% of the library's such wrists are. That alone brought this elbow to 145°: where the video shows an upper arm at its full length there is no side left to choose (the pose model puts her elbow at the outside of a puffy sleeve). So the refine stage also holds every elbow under 150°: 144°, with the silhouette and the hands where they were. On 40 library moves it had never seen, the new fit is as close as the old (0.212 → 0.211 torso lengths).

Feet back on the floor after the refine

Seen from the side for the first time, Aoi's spell cast stood 2-6 cm in the air. The retarget had put her planted soles on the floor (0.02 cm off it on average); the refine then turned her hips, knees and ankles toward the video, which lifted them, and nothing put them back. The correction step now measures each key's lowest shoe before the turn and after, and moves the pelvis by the difference - the lowest foot goes back to where the retarget had it, on the floor while planted, as high as it was in a jump. Where her feet run off the bottom of the video's frame, the video cannot say where the floor is, and the retarget's planting is kept: that stretch is the 1.9 cm left.

A picture in the wrong pose is drawn again

Asked for an A-pose in so many words, the image model drew a chef's habitual stance - fists on hips - and 32 minutes later the fused hands came out in shreds at his belt. A pose model now reads the arms of every new reference, and below 0.45 it is drawn again on a new seed. A picture you give is only warned about.

Limbs keep out of each other

A capture was performed by one person of one build. On a thicker character the same joint angles put a forearm inside a puffy sleeve and a heel into a thigh, and hang the arms inside a wide torso. Each character's elbows, knees and shoulders are now bent on its own mesh, 5° at a time, until one part goes 2 cm into another, and every clip is held inside those limits: an arm past its limit moves to the nearest allowed direction, an elbow or knee opens about its own hinge - a knee only while its foot is off the floor, so planted feet stay put. The last 10° of each limit are soft, so no correction has a corner in time. At 1 cm Mara's boxing guard was forced open by 25°; at 2 cm it is left alone.

What it cannot see is what one joint's limit cannot: hands swinging into thighs that are themselves moving, legs brushing past each other in strafes, arms through long hair.

The shoe the viewer sees is the one planted

Cadet's armoured boots went through the floor - in a walk, in a crouch walk - while the solve reported his feet planted. It planted a copy of the sole carried rigidly on the ankle bone, which on an ordinary shoe is the shoe. Cadet's ankle joint sits high inside a big boot, the upper boot blends with the shin, and the copy stood level on the floor while the boot on screen went under it. The planted shoe is now posed the way the viewer deforms it - each vertex by its own skin weights, with dual quaternions, matching Blender's own to 0.01 mm - and the whole shoe below the ankle counts, toe cap included: a planted key pivots on the flat of the sole, a key in the air keeps all of the shoe above the floor.

The first version thinned the shoe to 400 points. The median slip fell, but backpedals and strafes slid more - Juno walking backwards 6.0% → 11.4% of ground speed, Pip strafing 15.3% → 20.5% - at the same ground speed. Thinned, the shoe's lowest point jumped from one sample to the next as the foot rolled, and the planted pivot jumped with it. With every vertex (1,016–3,266 a foot) Juno is at 6.0% and Pip 7.8%; across 13 characters and nine gaits the worse foot slides a median 4.0% → 2.9% of ground speed.