---
number: 35
title: The characters stand like people — twelve bodies on a standard rig and motion-captured clips
date: 2026-10-22
summary: The day the arms and hands were solved. After two passes of editing the Meshy bodies by hand, every character now goes through Godot's humanoid profile and plays one shared library of motion-captured clips, with three measured fixes to each hand mesh. The sheet below is all twelve as they stand in the game now, and the notes say what was tried on the way.
epic: art-direction
status: delivered
artifacts: ["site/public/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-10-22-characters-sheet.jpg","docs/handoff/lookdev-round3.md","docs/handoff/lookdev/round5/","tools/bodies/standardise.py","tools/bodies/hand_bind.py","game/world/client/bodies/clips/"]
cta: [object Object]
---

![The twelve characters as they stand in the game, 22 October 2026](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-10-22-characters-sheet.jpg)

Eleven of these can be chosen on the account screen; Rah is given, never chosen. Each is a
Meshy body from the look-dev rounds (deliverable 32 was the first), cut into head, torso and
legs, wearing the player's shirt and pants colours. What is new today is how they **stand and
walk**: the arms hang, the wrists are straight, the hands are loose fists, the shoulders are
where shoulders go. It is on the web at `/play` and in `spellgrove-v44.apk`.

## What was tried, and where it landed

Kris, looking at the first close-up camera the night before: *"the hands are still palms
facing outwards… surely the way arms and hands sit is a solved problem of 3D models — why are
we struggling SO much with it?"* The short answer: a Meshy body comes with a rig that stops at
the wrist (no finger bones) and plays generic clips retargeted onto that rig, so the hand is
baked into the mesh in the spread A-pose it was generated in, and the arms sit wherever the
generic clip puts them. Three approaches were taken in two days:

1. **A fixed roll and a curl** (`hands.py`, 21 October): every upper arm rolled 60°, the
   fingers bent in the mesh. Judged by eye per body on sheets. Palms ended forward on most
   bodies and out on some, because every body's hand sits differently in its hand bone.
2. **A rest pose solved per body** (`rest_pose.py`, that evening): the skeleton posed through
   the idle as it plays, the arm, forearm and wrist turned by measured angles. Better — Kris:
   *"better, still weird… the arms seem wrong now, while the hands seem better."* Parked with a
   note that there must be an easier way.
3. **The standard way** (22 October): Godot's own humanoid profile gives every body the
   standard skeleton and rest pose, and one shared library of motion-captured clips —
   Quaternius's *Universal Animation Library*, CC0 — plays on all of them. No bone track is
   edited by hand. What the mesh must still say is done once per body by measurement: the
   wrist straightened (Meshy models the hand drooping 7°–46° off the forearm), the palm turned
   to face down as the profile assumes, the spread fingers closed into a loose fist. Kris, on
   the library's own mannequin: *"looks perfect — can we match that?"*

![Pigtails through the three passes: the fixed roll, the solved rest pose, the standard way](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-10-22-pigtails-three-passes.jpg)

![The elf beside the library's mannequin, the same idle](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-10-22-elf-vs-mannequin.jpg)

Mixamo — the free web auto-rigger most indie games use — was considered for the same job and
set aside: a third-party site, a manual pass per body, no API. Godot's retargeting and a CC0
library gave the same result offline, in one command per body.

**Not perfect, and known:** the fists are low-poly knots up close; Esmeralda's long fingers
read as a claw; the walk and run pace against the glide is a number per clip, judged on a
phone from here. Kris's verdict, and the reason this page exists: *"it isn't perfect, but it's
a long way from where we started, and much better."*