Playtest ask: "more detailed looking enemies... we have local trellis-2 and hunyuan, we can make
actual shaped pathogens". Two landed, keyed by ARCHETYPE so one mesh skins every instance of
that behaviour with no code change:
latcher -> Giardia trophozoite: teardrop body, broad front, ventral suction disc. 2232 tris.
Replaces a tetrahedron, and it is the one that matters most — a latcher ATTACHES
to your hull, so it is the only enemy the player ever sees close up.
driller -> H. pylori: thick corkscrew rod. 3231 tris. Replaces a cone.
Both prompts deliberately ask for BODIES and no flagella: the phage taught us image->3D webs
thin appendages into a lump, and at flat-emissive gameplay scale only the silhouette ships.
It worked — bbox aspect 3.80 (teardrop) and 2.12 (rod) against the phage's near-cubic 1.27:1.41:
0.94 failure, so these are genuinely shaped rather than blobs.
THE PIPELINE FIX that made them usable, worth recording: collapse-decimate FLOORS OUT on Trellis
output. Asking for 2500 tris gave 15871 and iterating moved it not at all; welding first made it
worse (12042 -> 78663); triangulating changed nothing. The answer is VOXEL REMESH first — it
rebuilds the surface as clean manifold topology, which is the right tool for a blobby organic and
finally gives decimate something it can collapse. 15439 -> 2232 and 78663 -> 3231, shapes intact,
4.4MB -> 91KB. Any future pathogen goes through the same path.
Not landed: seeker and turret. MODELBEAST returned 401 then 429 on both across two runs — the
guest token's active-job cap, not a content failure. The script is resumable; they need a quieter
window on the farm.
Honest limit, so nobody expects more than this delivers: at gameplay distance under flat emissive
these read mostly as silhouette, so the gain over the old primitives is real but modest. The place
it should actually show is a Giardia clamped to the hull. If we want enemies to read as DETAILED
rather than merely better-shaped, the lever is the rendering (a matcap or rim treatment on
entities), not more geometry — that is an ART_BIBLE decision, not a pipeline one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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