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Gate 2.4 asked for lean/stagger/brace clips staged by wind band. The answer,
measured twice, is that the asset shouldn't exist.
1. The lean cannot be a clip. _rotOnly drops Hips.quaternion from every clip at
load (player.js:53, applied :239). Parsed the shipped pack to confirm rather
than trust the read: 17 clips, 195 channels each, 64 survive. A lean baked
into a clip's hips is discarded. And stripping it is right — the wind's
bearing swings (the change; site_02's venturi) and a canned clip has one
fixed lean axis, so only the sim can aim it. Same trick as the knockdown and
climbY. The lean is D's root pitch; thresholds proposed off Beaufort 7
("inconvenience felt when walking against the wind" = 13.9 m/s), which lands
storm_01 never leaning, storm_03 gusting through the line, storm_02 in gale.
2. Mixamo has no wind animations. Searched the real API, not assumed: shiver
returns zero, brace returns eleven ledge-hang clips, wind returns Catwalk
Turn. The factory header already recorded this in Sprint 3.
Rendered the two real candidates on a skinned rig, twice each — as authored and
as the game shows them. Pushing is a squat shoving a couch. Leaning is a man
waiting for a bus. Both rejected. Both would have passed every check we own:
they load, they're metre-scale, their nodes survive. Dims can't answer "is this
the right shape" — the bike rule, catching a whole feature this time.
Brace and stagger already ship (TakeCover, StumbleBack, Reaction). D should wire
the root lean first; I'll hand-author a WindPosture additive into the gap we can
both see, if one remains. Spine rotation survives _rotOnly, so it would land.
Evidence, harness and repro in tools/character/windclip_candidates/, plus the
four pipeline traps I hit in order so the next lane doesn't.
selftest 335/0/0, unchanged — no asset added, no shipped file touched.
83 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
# Wind clips — the Mixamo candidates, and why they're rejected
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Lane E, Sprint 13 gate 2.4 ("wind clips for the player — lean / stagger / brace,
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staged by wind band, through the Mixamo pipeline").
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**Outcome: no clip shipped. The Mixamo pipeline cannot supply a wind lean, and the
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lean was never going to be a clip in the first place.** Both halves of that are
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measured, and the evidence is in this folder. Full argument in THREADS [E] 2026-07-17/18.
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## 1. Mixamo has no wind animations
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Searched the real API (`fetch.cjs search`, on ultra), not assumed:
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| term | what comes back |
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|---|---|
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| `brace` | eleven **Braced Hang** ledge-climbing clips |
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| `wind` | Standing Idle 04, Catwalk Walk Turn 180 |
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| `shiver` | nothing, 0 results |
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| `stagger` | three walks (Swagger Walk, Walking, Walking) |
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| `lean` | Leaning On A Wall, Leaning, One Shoulder Lean |
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| `push` | Pushing, Push Up, Button Pushing |
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The factory's own header already recorded half of this in Sprint 3 — *"Hammering /
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Sweeping Floor / **Bracing** don't exist on Mixamo — skipped."* This is the case
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the asset-pipeline skill names directly: *truly bespoke clips don't exist on
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Mixamo — hand-author, don't keep searching.*
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## 2. The two real candidates, rendered and rejected
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`skinshot.py` films a skinned Mixamo FBX twice: **as authored**, and **as the game
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shows it** (Hips rotation cleared, which is what `player.js:_rotOnly` does at load).
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The second row is the honest one.
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- **`rejected_Pushing.png`** — not a wind lean. A deep squat shoving something heavy
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along the ground, standing up at the end. It reads as *moving a couch*. The
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forward angle I hoped to borrow is a squat, not a lean.
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- **`rejected_Leaning.png`** — a casual weight-on-the-back-foot lean, the "propped
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against a bar" pose. Hands slack, no tension, near-identical across all five
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frames. A person waiting for a bus, not one in a gale.
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Neither is close enough to fix by retiming. Shipping either would have passed every
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check we have — they load, they're metre-scale, their nodes survive — and been wrong
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on screen. That's the bike rule: **the verify can't answer "is this the right shape."**
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## 3. The useful technical result
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In both strips the raw and stripped rows are **near-identical**, which is worth
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knowing: these clips carry their lean in the **spine**, and spine rotation survives
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`_rotOnly` intact. So a hand-authored posture (spine curl, shoulder hunch, arm up)
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*would* survive the loader. What cannot survive is a lean authored into the **hips** —
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`_rotOnly` drops `Hips.quaternion` from every clip (`player.js:53`, applied `:239`).
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Measured on the shipped pack: 17 clips, 195 channels each, **64 survive**.
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Which is why the lean belongs in `player.sim.js` as a root pitch aimed at
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`wind.dirAt(t)` — the wind's bearing swings (the change; site_02's venturi) and a
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canned clip has one fixed lean axis. Same trick as the knockdown and `climbY`.
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## Reproducing
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```sh
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# on ultra (the FBX libraries and the Mixamo login live there; JING5 has neither)
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mkdir -p /tmp/shadeswind && cd /tmp/shadeswind
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cp ~/Documents/mixamo-fetch/fetch.cjs .
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printf 'Pushing\nLeaning\n' > wishlist.txt
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SKIN=1 node fetch.cjs "X Bot" # SKIN=1: needs a mesh to judge a silhouette
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/Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender -b --factory-startup \
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-P skinshot.py -- /tmp/shadeswind/out/Pushing.fbx Pushing
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```
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Notes for whoever next reaches for this pipeline:
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- `fetch.cjs` reads its token from a **logged-in Brave on ultra via CDP** (port 9222).
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Nobody types a password; the session is already there. It 429s after a handful of
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exports — space them out.
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- `resolveChar` defaults to `Grandma_mixamo`, which is not currently uploaded to the
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account. **`X Bot`** is a Mixamo stock rig and works; for anim-only export the source
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rig is irrelevant anyway, since `_rotOnly` keeps rotations only.
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- Anim-only FBX (`SKIN` unset) has **no mesh** and renders nothing. Judging a
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silhouette needs `SKIN=1`.
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- Don't retarget onto `Hum_M_1_mixamo.fbx` to preview: its armature carries FBX's
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0.01 unit scale and the clip's action doesn't, so the body collapses to ~3 cm.
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That's the same "peds cannot round-trip through Blender" trap `build_player_anims.py`
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documents.
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