animation/characters/rig-work/README.md

# characters/rig-work — disposable AccuRig rig carriers

Decimated FBX copies of the unrigged Tripo bodies whose **only** job is to carry a
skeleton out of AccuRig and back. AccuRig refuses the raw ~1.9M-tri FBX outright
(confirmed 2026-08-04), so the bait exists purely to be small enough to rig.

**Never ship a file from this folder.** The graft takes geometry and materials from
the pristine GLB and only the *skeleton* from the bait — see
`.agents/plans/rig-graft-lane-2026-08-04.md` for the lane.

**"Disposable" now has one exception, and it is about reproducibility, not shipping.**
A bait that fed a *nearest-surface* graft is a required input to that graft forever: it
is the only thing index-exact with the AccuRig return that is also in the pristine GLB's
space, so it is what recovers AccuRig's offset in closed form. Such a bait gets **copied**
(not moved) into the ship folder alongside the AccuRig output. It is still never shipped
to the game, and the copy here stays disposable. First case:
`lena_leafbikini_base_v01` — see that folder's README, "the bait is the bridge".

Per `../REGISTRY.md` rule 11 this folder is exempt from the filename grammar and gets
no Derived-artifacts rows; the grafted body's notes column names the bait its skeleton
came from. The tool-era names are kept on purpose so these stay recognisable as
throwaway.

## Current contents (built 2026-08-04, moved here from ariki-game 2026-08-06)

| file | tris | notes |
|---|---|---|
| `lena_tripo_rigbait.fbx` | 77,999 | from `originals/female/female_lena_tripo.glb` |
| `lena_leafbikini_tripo_rigbait.fbx` | 77,999 | from `originals/female/female_lena_leafbikini_tripo.glb` (2026-08-13); leaf-bikini garment sculpted on — fine for AccuRig (silhouette only), fingers distinct. **Rigged and shipped 2026-08-13** as `lena_leafbikini_base_v01`; copy preserved in that ship folder |
| `mako_tripo_rigbait.fbx` | 78,000 | from `originals/male/male_base_bald_tripo_v1.glb` |
| `*_qa_front.png`, `*_qa_hand.png` | — | QA renders; fingers fully distinct, no webbing |

Built with `tools/rigbait_decimate.py`: region budgets body 24k / head 14k /
**hands 40k**, no scale and no recenter (native ~0.98 m, feet at Z=0).

**These two have hands.** The lane is being rebuilt with the hands cut and a GLB
sibling emitted from the same decimation; when that lands, these are superseded.

## Traps

- Baits are geometry-only (~3.5 MB), so AccuRig shows a grey model. That's fine for
  rigging, but it means the July "Dummy001 export" check can't use textures: **verify
  AccuRig's output by mesh name + tri count instead.**
  *Correction 2026-08-13:* the parenthetical used to read "a GLB's packed textures don't
  survive the FBX embed". They do — `rigbait_decimate.py` exports with
  `embed_textures=True`, and `lena_leafbikini_tripo_rigbait.fbx` carries 4K basecolor and
  normal in its `.fbm/`. What is actually true is the reverse direction: **AccuRig strips
  them**, and its return has no images at all. Verify by mesh name + tri count either way.
- AccuRig exports come back to this folder as `<character>_tripo_rigged.fbx` (plus a
  settings `.json` and an often-empty `.fbm/`). The older `_tripo_accurig.fbx` spelling in
  the lane plan was never what the tool actually wrote.
- These files used to live in `ariki-game/assets/models/characters/rig-work/` and
  needed a `.gdignore` to stop Godot importing them. Nothing here is a game asset;
  that is precisely why the folder moved.