Deliverable #30 · 2026-09-22
Attempts at styling by AI
Kris, on the evening of 22 September, looking at the last of these: “That is comically bad. It’s incredible and it’s funny. This has been such a journey to get here.” This page is the journey, in order, with the samples exactly as they were delivered — nothing re-rendered or tidied for the record.
Sixty-four kinds of head — 19 September 2026, reverted 22 September
The brief: sixty-four heads, one per hexagram, as data — eight families by the upper trigram (humanoid, insect, bird, dragon, wood, amphibian, stone, beast), varied eight ways each by the lower trigram, built from at most six primitive meshes, no colour in the table. It was built in a day: the table, the family scenes, the wire, the portraits, the tests, and the sign-off sheet below. Kris’s verdict, three days later: “really unhappy with all of the attempts at making faces.” The whole thing was reverted in one commit. The witch kept her hat.
A second brief was written the same day for Claude Design — a painted face on a tinted sphere plus up to three primitive pieces, two decals per head for talking. It was never sent. The painted-face half of that idea is what the next attempt used.
Falon
Between the heads and the next attempt, Kris reached out to Falon, a local artist, and offered to buy her sketches to use to inform the models. She didn’t want her work used by AI, and that stands. So the next drawings came from inside the house.
Rah’s sketches, cut into parts — 22 September 2026
Ten photographs of Rah’s sketchbook. The ask: cut the eyes, the mouths and the hair out of her faces as separate parts, solid black lines, cartoony; let a player pick one of each on the account screen; save it at once and wear it on the head in the game. Built the same evening and put on the web and the phone to be judged on the heads, not on a sheet.
What the parts were made of: each photo flattened and thresholded to a line mask, her lines
thickened, irises and whites laid under them as shapes, the one red blush band kept red, hair
as her outline traced into a silhouette with her strokes inside. A shader projects the three
pictures onto the front of the head sphere; hair is mirrored to the back. The tool that cut
them is tools/faces/, and can re-cut any part from its spec.
The contact sheets — the parts beside what they were cut from
Kris asked for these to tell whether the problem was in the parts or in putting them on the heads. It is mostly the parts. The threshold turns her fine pencil lines into lumps; the small doodles (glare, closed, tears, glasses, the shark) are unreadable; the hair loses its shape because anything drawn outside the head’s circle is clipped, so the crown’s flames and the spikes are gone and every hair is the same brown helmet. The heads then flatten what is left. Each row: her drawing on the left, the cut part on a head-coloured disc on the right.
What comes next
Not an AI. The faces will be drawn by hand, by Rah, and by us. The picker, the wire and the shader were rolled back the same evening — nothing of this is in the game now — and the handoffs and renders stay beside this page as the record.
27 September 2026: the next attempt is deliverable 31 — Rah drew the eyes, mouths and hair herself, digitally, and they are cut out exactly as drawn and put on the head in a viewer, with nothing yet in the game.
Sources & artifacts
← related epic: character-composition-poc
Also available as raw markdown.