2,166 controls · 392 deform bones
223 corrective shapes, hand/foot IK, elbow/knee poles, pelvis, chest, head, and gaze controls. Nine stress poses rendered locally.
Open machine auditScenic · character R&D
Quality first. Organic posing is the gate.
An evidence page for choosing the character foundation under the shot designer: high-quality surfaces, useful hairstyle and wardrobe coverage, and deformation that survives seated, contact, and combat poses.
Current recommendation
Preserve the approved image-driven Mara/Ivo appearance workflow, but replace Meshy’s 24-joint auto-rig with a production rig and corrective deformation pass. Pilot MetaHuman Full Rig first; benchmark CC5 as the modular catalog alternative.
Experiment 01
Pose stress test
The same semantic intent is applied through each rig’s available controls. Rain is a production-quality reference, not a proposed final visual style.
Production-source audit
Two independent animator rigs clear the structural bar
These are actual Blender Studio source files inspected locally, not marketplace screenshots or claimed feature lists.
799 controls · 165 deform bones
Full fingers, eyes, eyelids, brows, face shapes, layered jacket, sweater, pants, boots, hair, beard, and props. Confirms the result with a male production asset.
Open machine auditExperiment 02
Hairstyle coverage
All 35 styles from the audited MPFB/MakeHuman CC0 pack. This proves breadth and identifies gaps; the visual quality remains below the final bar.
Mara-like volume is covered by Afro and cloud/puffy silhouettes. Pigtails are only approximated by double braids. A true mohawk and exact barbered crew cut still need sourced or commissioned assets.
Experiment 03
Wardrobe coverage
All 55 items from the audited CC0 wardrobe. It is a taxonomy and integration fixture, not a production art library.
Suits, dresses, shirts, trousers, boots, sweaters, and traditional silhouettes are represented. The explicit trenchcoat requirement is not; Mara/Ivo’s generated coats remain visually stronger.
Production acquisition target
The minimum versatile catalog
The open thumbnails expose what exists; this taxonomy defines what a high-quality purchased or commissioned library must cover before it becomes the Scenic default.
Decision matrix
Systems worth pursuing
Ranked for this project’s actual priorities: organic full-body posing and control-image quality first, ecosystem breadth second, browser size last.
| # | System | Organic pose | Appearance | Hair / dress breadth | Web handoff | Rights |
|---|
Target architecture
Don’t ship the animator rig to the browser
High-control production rig
Full-body IK, hand and foot goals, pole vectors, spine/chest/pelvis controls, gaze targets, fingers, joint limits, pose-space correctives, and optional cloth/hair dynamics.
Agentic pose service
Parse semantic contacts, choose a pose prior, solve whole-body balance and collisions offline, then bake only deform-bone transforms and approved corrective weights.
Lean runtime contract
The browser loads the appearance mesh plus a standardized deform skeleton. It never needs thousands of authoring controls, only the baked pose, gaze, expression, and camera-visible asset state.