Six new renders since update 09. The headline is the cloak: in a blind test against professional game models it landed inside the judges' own noise, which is the first time a piece of clothing has done that. The skin-tight outfit is still clearly behind, so it is being rebuilt from a single traced garment mask. The face kit dropped the pale eye ring and the crude open mouth the judges kept naming. The hair got the most attention: round 17 rebuilds it from one point on the crown, smooth on top and separating toward the tips, and it is the best-scoring hair so far, but it stays unpublished until it clearly beats the current version. We also froze everything as a baseline with step-by-step recipes, so any of these results can be rebuilt exactly. Work pauses here until the weekly usage reset.
Only our own renders appear here. No concept art, no other studios' models or stills, and the AI-made ghost mesh is never shown without a tracing-guide label.
Note
TL;DR — Product 1 (playable character): 47% · Overall (Products 1 + 2): 25% · Now: S3 — Body + head topology (C001 is assembled and shaded. Since update 09: the cloak reached pro level in a blind test (inside the judges' noise), the face kit's eye ring and crude open mouth are gone, and the hair is being rebuilt from the crown the way pro bobs are made (best score yet, not published until it clearly beats the current hair). Clothing is now traced from one garment mask so it survives body changes. Work is paused until the weekly usage reset on Oct 7; every result so far is frozen as baseline B1 with step-by-step recipes to get back to it)
Roadmap. S0 to S10 are Product 1, S11 is Product 2.
| Stage | Work | Status |
|---|---|---|
| S0 | Foundations: research, MMD dataset + metrics, reference shelf | ▶ in progress, 99% |
| S1 | Critic (judge) kit + calibration | ✅ done |
| S2 | C001 concept sheets + Meshy ghost | ✅ done |
| S3 | Body + head topology (adult-female family template) | ▶ in progress, 92% |
| S4 | Face system: eyes, mouth interior, expressions, face shading | ▶ in progress, 55% |
| S5 | Hair, clothing layers, bone arms, boots | ▶ in progress, 55% |
| S6 | Rig, weights, correctives, physics | ▶ in progress, 45% |
| S7 | Texturing + materials (Kuro-look NPR, Blender to Unreal) | ▶ in progress, 45% |
| S8 | Unreal import, motion, motion-matching locomotion | ▶ in progress, 35% |
| S9 | Combat kit + VFX | ▶ in progress, 20% |
| S10 | Full blind test (Product 1) | ○ not started |
| S11 | Chassis + C002 + C003 + provider swap tests (Product 2) | ○ not started |
As of 2026-10-01. Percentages are effort-weighted stage estimates and get re-forecast as real costs come in.
What landed
Newest first. Times are local time at the build machine (UTC+7).
2026-10-01
Hair round 17 rebuilt the outer hair as many narrow strands that all start from one point on the crown: smooth on top, separating only toward the ends, with separate fringe locks and a few deliberate loose wisps. It is the closest to professional work so far, but the gain is still within the judges' normal variation and the strand ends look shredded, so the earlier version stays published while we thicken the tips next.
Round 11 of C001's face kit: the eyes now lie flat on the face, with a painted lower liner, lashes lying on the lid, a layered grey-green iris with star sparkles, and a rose-brown wing tip. The surprised mouth reads as a soft pink cavity with a thin band of teeth. In a blind test, judges no longer flagged the eye ring or the crude open mouth; their remaining tells were mostly head shape and paint.
18:23 · S7 shader + texturing · S7
C001's chin shadow now ends in a soft horizontal band on the neck, her silver hair uses the hair lane's new ring and strand maps for a highlight band and two-tone strips, and her boots show separate sole, heel, toe cap, shaft and cuff tones, all under four lighting presets.
The cloak drapes from the shoulders with a drawn-in waist and a flaring hem, the hood has a crisp rim over the new ears, and the straps now have real edges and run through the gold harness rings. Clay and wireframe views.
Hair round 15 smoothed the hair over the new ears (no more crumpled strips there), laid the fringe back onto the forehead with one point between the eyes, and added the maps the hair shader needs. A fairer scoring method with four separate judges shows the hair is still clearly short of professional work and did not move this round: the many thin, even strips need to be rebuilt as fewer, wider clumps, which is the next step.
13:54 · stitch (seams + junctions) · S5
Stitch round 3 fixed the shared preview tool so every lane sees its part in the right place, then cleaned the meeting points: hair now rests on the choker instead of passing through it, the cloak no longer cuts into the body, and the jaw seam shades as one surface.
Previous update: CharacterForge update 09: the first fully shaded look at C001