Putting the first Effigy-built man and woman into the game

Two humans built with Effigy, an AI 3D tool that runs on my own GPU, now stand in the start area. The man idles, the woman walks a four-corner loop, and each swings when the party talks to them.

I’m trying Effigy because I want cheaper modeling, with fewer tokens spent and the same quality and style. Until now every Effigy result sat in scratch folders as sheets and films. On 17 October I asked for the text-to-3D process that worked for the orc to be repeated for all the racial bodies, and I picked the human as the first one to go into the game, kept separate from the human body I already had. I wanted to judge the trial in the game and not on a sheet.

How did the Effigy route become part of the kit?

The trial’s assemble script took Effigy’s rough mesh and put it on the game’s skeleton. It’s now a kit module with a generator and a run script beside it. What Effigy made is an input named by file hash, with its prompt, seeds and the concept I picked, so a build can be repeated. The kit fits the skeleton, binds the skin, adds the head rig and face bones, joins the head to the body at the neck and paints a new texture set.

Both humans then went through the whole model pipeline and its gate, as a body plus a head. The bodies are 7,991 and 7,992 triangles and the heads 1,282 and 1,184. The gate found a list of things the trial had never noticed. The imported rig had empty animation tracks, so every exported clip was a still. The hand joints and belly had no weights, and neither did the brows, eyes and lids. The ankle sat too high. Each fix went into the kit, not into the one model.

Why did the soles sink into the floor?

The first clips came from a set made on the existing human body. On the Effigy bodies they put the soles under the floor, and the corpse lay 7 to 9 cm into it. Each Effigy body now gets its own clip set, 43 clips, made on its own build. The corpse lies at minus 1 mm.

What did the neck study change?

For human, dwarf and elf the head and body are no longer joined with a seam. The kit blends the two surfaces across a band, 72 angles around the neck, and the human collar step went from 57 mm to 0. A size rule scales the head to the body before the cut and before the hair fit, so the bones follow. It came out as 1.0701 for the man and 1.0367 for the woman. The older joins are still in the kit behind a flag, and orc, goblin and lizard use them.

Why does the head still look boxy?

I kept a skull graft, where the skull under the hair is the existing human head 01. The shared hair is fitted to that shape. Without the graft the hair’s edge sat 29.3 mm off the skin on the man and 45 to 50 mm on the woman, and 361 of 361 and 358 of 358 test poses clipped. With it, all 8 hair styles fit both heads. The cost is a boxy front view. The man’s head has an 81 mm neck radius over a 65 mm body neck. I don’t love it. The back of the neck has no gap. I’m going to redo all the hair once the new races are finished, so the graft can be reconsidered then.

The eyes are painted. The face bones are weighted to the nearest skin so the gate’s skin check passes, but there are no eyeballs or lids, so a blink moves the skin over the painted eye a little. That’s on the work list.

How do the NPCs move?

I wrote a small script, NpcMotion, that gives any NPC file two things. A walks list of points is walked over and over in game time with the figure’s walk clip, at the pace of its stride, and talking to the figure stops it. A talk_clip, here the attack, plays once as a conversation opens. There’s no physics, so a loop has to be laid clear of things, and the party can stand in the way and gets walked through.

Why did I take the hair off again?

Later the same day I asked to undo the hair on the new bodies so I could see them in the game without the warping from the hair tweaks. Both humans now wear the heads Effigy made, bald: no skull graft, and no pull or squeeze to fit hair. The blend band, the size rule and the head scales (1.0701 and 1.0367) stay, and the triangle counts don’t change.

The neck is cleaner without the graft. At rest the step at the sides and back went from 4.0 to 2.2 mm on the man and 4.7 to 2.9 mm on the woman, and the front stays closed. The man’s head and body neck radii went from 81 and 65 mm to 57 and 67 mm. His temples are 128 mm across instead of 143, and the crown is 226 mm instead of 206. The boxy look came from the existing human head 01’s 18 cm skull sitting behind a 13 cm face. The old fitting is now a kit switch, --hair-fit, off by default, and the hair redo will turn it back on.

Filming it found a separate fault. The party’s portrait heads were picked from every human head file, so three party members had picked up the Effigy NPCs’ faces after the first landing. Portraits now only take the numbered heads. The film above is the new take.

Also done

• The Effigy parts of the third-party notes now say the game’s credits have to carry “Built with DINOv3”, because Effigy’s mesh stage is built on it. The game has no credits screen yet.
• The tests for the Effigy NPCs (42), the model pipeline (2,330) and the model gate (160) pass. The world frame-time test fails with these files moved out too, so it’s not from this.