The test renderer turned out to be the product. Everything that decides how the
work looks - stabilisation, reduction, timing, frame removal, palette - already
happens here, and the flat indexed output already reads the way it should.
The reason to leave is in the original design's own rule: never make a timing
decision that requires a full render to evaluate. Honouring that moved every
judgement out of Animator Pro, which left the host doing nothing but writing a
file, in exchange for modal UI, minutes-long renders, one-level undo, FLX delta
invariants, a single tween state and a cel singleton.
What does NOT change is the constraint. 320x200, indexed palette, flat fills,
no antialiasing - inherited, but load-bearing rather than accidental. The
rasteriser writes palette indices and expands to RGBA only at the end precisely
so nothing can soften an edge. Modern conveniences belong in the workflow.
Adds docs/design.md: the principles, carried over without the Poco/FLX/cel
machinery, plus architecture and an honest list of what is missing - the
largest gap being that plates still have nowhere to be drawn.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"It feels like it does nothing" is indistinguishable from "it does nothing",
and at 24fps a lead of 1 is 42ms - small enough to reasonably doubt. So the
shift is now provable and visible rather than taken on trust:
- shiftIndex is a pure exported function with assertions covering identity,
both directions, and clamping at each end
- the frame label always shows the mouth frame, not only when shifted, so the
number can be watched diverging from f; non-zero leads also report in ms
- the slider readout carries an explicit + sign
- the stabilised pane draws the unshifted contour as a dark-green ghost when a
lead is set, so the offset is something you can see
Also: leadIndex called opts() on every invocation - ~14 DOM reads, once per
strip thumbnail, so ~1000 per redraw at 74 frames. It reads a cached scalar now.
The "different pose" assertion checks the whole track rather than one pair:
synthetic poses hold for nine-frame beats, so a single pair can legitimately be
identical while the shift works correctly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MediaPipe normalises x by image WIDTH and y by image HEIGHT, so for a 1080x1920
clip one unit of x is 1080px and one unit of y is 1920px. makeXform applied a
single scale to both, stretching everything horizontally by H/W - 1.78x on this
footage. The photo underlay looked equally squashed because frameAffine divided
x by imgW, matching the equally wrong vector shapes rather than disagreeing
with them.
Fixed at ingest: landmarks convert to an isotropic space whose unit is one image
height (x *= W/H), so equal numbers mean equal pixels everywhere downstream.
Pixel mapping follows - both axes divide by imgH.
This also silently fixes head roll. fitSimilarity was fitting a rotation in a
sheared space, so the "similarity" it recovered was not one, and stabilisation
of rolled heads was subtly wrong.
selftest: a shape circular in pixel space must stay circular in raster space,
checked at 1080x1920, 1920x1080 and 640x640. Fails at ratio 1.78 without the
conversion.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sparseness was being applied for two different reasons at once. Aesthetic
sparseness is set by the extraction rate; labour sparseness only binds on the
plate, because a human draws each one. The mouth is traced and therefore free,
and in limited animation lip sync is routinely the densest element - on 1s
while heads hold on 2s and 3s.
So: the mouth gets a key on every frame, and the frame strip is now the
editing surface for deciding which frames need their own plate drawing. All
frames start kept; delete the ones you don't want.
- strip of face-cropped thumbnails, keep/drop per frame, keyboard driven
- worksheet panel lists the drawings needed and the range each one holds
- Suggest runs error-tolerance decimation on head pose as a starting point
- export writes sparse plate keys + dense mouth keys, with a hold manifest
- smoothContours: bounded exception to "never smooth the contour", which held
only while keys were sparse enough to reject detector noise by sampling
- averages are now a RADIUS in frames: 0 is off, 1 is +-1
- GPU delegate falls back to CPU instead of failing
- #synth / #frames autorun for headless smoke tests
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Analysis half of the pipeline in docs/roto-puppet.md. Stabilises a face out
of a clip via a similarity fit on rigid landmarks, reduces the lip contour to
a fixed vertex budget, selects sparse keys on velocity minima, and previews
the result as flat indexed fills so timing can be judged without an Animator
Pro render.
- landmarks.js ordered lip/oval rings; slot position is vertex identity
- mathutil.js closed-form 2D similarity, Procrustes mean, transform smoothing
- pipeline.js stabilise -> subsample -> key-select
- raster.js indexed scanline fill, no antialiasing
- take.js take-file writer
- selftest.js 29 assertions, incl. ring simplicity at every vertex budget
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
