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>
Smoothing does not literally delay anything - a centred moving average has zero
phase lag - but it blurs onsets, so the visually salient moment of a mouth
opening moves later even though the mean does not. Animators also draw mouth
shapes a frame or two ahead of the sound as standard practice, so this is the
normal control rather than a workaround.
Only the performance tracks shift; the head and audio stay put, since it is the
mouth that should anticipate. In photo-underlay modes the vector mouth will
therefore no longer match the frame behind it, which is expected.
The lead is baked into the exported take - key f carries the pose from source
frame f+lead - so the Animator Pro renderer never needs to know about it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A knob wired in app.js but missing from the markup throws during wiring, aborts
the module and leaves a blank page - a symptom pointing nowhere near its cause.
It has now happened twice, so it gets a check rather than vigilance: the
selftest fetches both files and compares the id sets in each direction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The band filled the mouth because a band is the wrong reduction: the bright
region is a blob, and reading it as "everything above a line" throws the shape
away.
Extracting a contour reintroduces the vertex-correspondence problem that made
me avoid it, but for a blob there is a way out. Radial sampling from the
centroid along N fixed directions makes vertex k always mean "the extent in
direction k": correspondence holds by construction, the count is fixed, and
temporal smoothing cannot reorder anything. It also yields a star-shaped
reduction, which suits flat colour.
Tongue rejection, which the band had no way to express:
- pixels red relative to their own brightness are dropped (teeth are neutral)
- component choice is biased toward the top of the cavity, since area alone
picks the tongue when the mouth is wide
- separate inner and outer controls: cavity erode pulls the sampled region off
the lip edge, blob grow/erode resizes the found blob
Also: a knob wired in app.js but missing from index.html threw during wiring
and left a blank page with nothing useful in the console - which is exactly
what happened to teethDwell in the previous commit. el() now names the missing
id, and window.onerror surfaces it in the status line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MediaPipe has no landmarks inside the lips, so teeth have to come from pixels.
Tracing the bright blob would give a new contour every frame with no vertex
correspondence - the exact boil docs/roto-puppet.md warns about.
So the measurement yields a scalar, not a shape: Otsu within the cavity, scanned
from the top for where the bright run stops, giving one line height per frame.
The teeth polygon is the inner lip ring clipped to that line, so the silhouette
is always the mouth's own shape and cannot disagree with the lips around it,
and the only per-frame variable is a single number that smooths trivially.
Presence gets hysteresis and minimum dwell, as plate selection does: a teeth
block blinking on and off for single frames is worse than one simply absent.
Tongue is not implemented. The same scalar approach would apply, gated on
redness rather than brightness, but it is not visible in the test footage - the
cavity reads dark with a bright upper-teeth band and nothing else.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The generated face oval was never going to be good enough to draw from:
MediaPipe's face oval is the FACE boundary, cut at the hairline and excluding
hair, ears, jaw and neck, so it is an egg by construction. Segmentation would
give a real head outline but costs a 16MB model and per-frame inference for a
shape that gets replaced by a drawing anyway.
So the plate layer becomes switchable, and the useful modes are photographic:
the source frame mapped into raster space through the same transform chain the
contours go through. Registration is the whole point - the head sits still and
a drawing traced from the underlay is already aligned to the mouth. An
unregistered underlay would be decoration.
- underlay.js: pixel->raster affine (a general affine, since MediaPipe
normalises x by width and y by height), registered draw, palette posterise
- plate modes: photo / photo dim / posterized / oval / oval+photo / none, B cycles
- worksheet cells are registered composites rather than raw crops
- Save frame 4x writes a 1280x800 PNG to draw on
- selftest: FACE_OVAL simplicity, which was never asserted; a wrong ordering
there reads as a lumpy plate rather than an obvious bowtie
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lip sync cannot be judged silently. extract.sh now pulls the audio track and
writes manifest.json alongside the frames; the page reads the true extraction
rate from it rather than assuming one, since a guessed fps desynchronises
picture from sound - the one thing this view exists to show.
Audio is the clock: frame = floor(currentTime * fps). A slow render loop drops
frames instead of drifting, and half/quarter speed work via playbackRate with
the picture following for free. Scrubbing, stepping and clicking a thumbnail
all seek the audio too.
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>
