lowpoly-mmo · character and creature pipeline · updated 2026-10-19

Creature Portfolio

Every character and monster built so far from concept art or sprites, on our two RTX 3090s: clean front view, turnaround sheet, Pixal3D mesh, game-ready bake, rig, animation clips and, where it won, an UltraTex retexture. Pick a model in the catalog, drag to orbit, and pick a clip to play it. Use ← and → to step through them.

Loading model…

—drag to orbit · scroll to zoom

Clips · floor check

Production line

What we took from the videos

Video	His technique	On b-dozer + mind	Result here
Qwen turnaround → Pixal3D multiview PpuNKVoSYB4	Qwen-Image 2.1 makes a clean T-pose front view, then a 4-panel turnaround with strict 90° profiles (prompt enhancer off). Pixal3D multiview turns it into a textured mesh, fov 20, crops padded 1.1.	Same models already run natively in our ComfyUI on both boxes. We use an A-pose with air gaps instead of a T-pose, because our SkinTokens → Mixamo retarget is tuned on it. We copied his profile wording: one eye visible, far arm hidden, never three-quarter.	All 4 sheets came out with true profiles. Mesh: 180 s (vampire) and 278 s (dwarf) on b-dozer at 1536 with all four views.
Watertight meshes + game-ready bake dmDrktqyT5o	Remesh to a watertight shell, cut to 20–30k tris for characters, unwrap, bake albedo + normal from the high-poly with a short ray distance, weld vertices.	Blender voxel remesh plays the watertight role. Then decimate, smart UV and a Cycles selected-to-active bake on this Mac's GPU. His 0.2% ray distance led us to tighten ours from 6% to 2%.	Vampire 20k tris in 10 s. Dwarf 30k tris in 22 s, after fixing inward-facing triangles (see below).
Open-source animation round-up x-WSSlHNcJQ	SkinTokens auto-rig, then UniMate generates motion from text for any skeleton. UniMate weights are CC BY-NC.	SkinTokens runs on mind, and now on b-dozer too (a separate bphil install, CUDA 12.6 build for its older driver). Clips come from our mesh2motion library. UniMate is not installed yet.	Rigs: 52 bones in 43 s and 34 bones in 24 s. Clips baked in 7–8 s per character, then grounded per clip.

What we learned

worked Strong raw meshes

Pixal3D multiview kept separate fingers, the vampire's cape lining and collar, and the dwarf's spikes, braids and boots.
The cleaned front view and turnaround sheet take about 1 minute per character on a 3090.
From concept art to animated GLB in about 6–8 minutes of GPU time per character.

fixed Dwarf bake shards

Decimating the voxel remesh hard left triangles facing inward. They baked as dark shards and showed as holes with backface culling.
Fix: a coarser voxel (size/160) fuses thin plates into one solid, and each low-poly triangle is oriented by the nearest high-poly surface. Bake rays are 2% of the size instead of 6%.
Baking at 20k straight inside ComfyUI collapsed the dwarf's double shell, so we kept the Blender route.

fixed Floating clips

Some library clips carry a hip-height offset. Hit_Chest floated 0.56 m on the vampire and 0.38 m on the dwarf.
Each clip now gets a constant hip offset so the skinned foot soles touch the floor. Death clips use the whole body; Levitate floats on purpose.

fixed Coat, beard and faces

Coat and cape: the hem now hangs from the hips instead of the thighs, and four hem bones lift it clear of the floor on every frame. Jog went from −18 cm to 0, Two-hand Blast from −17 cm to 0.
Beard and pauldron: four new mesh variants ran two per GPU at once (~4.3 min). The second sheet with seed 2222 has a ginger beard and pauldrons seated on the shoulders.
Faces: the vampire's head keeps 3,600 triangles instead of 1,405 at the same 20k total. The dwarf's face is mostly beard and keeps plain decimation; a head budget there also caught the spiky pauldrons and broke the bake.

new Why ours looked worse than the videos

We had swapped the creator's finishing chain for a rough Blender stage. His real chain is WTiVo watertight → LODTailor → Bake Forger with six 4096 maps.
Our remesh kept Trellis's hidden inner shell (the source of the shards), and ran at lower settings: 768 remesh and 2048 textures with 2 maps.
When we tried ComfyUI's built-in remesh as a WTiVo substitute, its "drop inverted parts" option deleted the dwarf's legs and an arm.
The full chain now runs on Linux on both GPUs. WTiVo was rebuilt from its open source, with the AMD port turned back into CUDA. Quad Reconstruct's CuMesh library and Fast Merge's C++ library were compiled too. WTiVo's output is watertight with the whole body.
Quad Reconstruct mattered. Without it the 30k model had about 8,900 open seam edges; with it the vampire's has 36. Fast Merge still cannot fully close the baked file, so it leaves it unchanged, as it is designed to.
Many of the video's best shots are high-poly models in an HDR viewer. This viewer now uses environment lighting too.

open Still to do

The vampire's eyes are still soft at game resolution; a quick hand-paint of the eyes would finish it (the video recommends the same).
The dwarf's tattered skirt fringe has a few gaps where thin shreds fall below the coarser voxel size.
UniMate text-to-motion is not tested yet.

Where the files are

What	Path in lowpoly-mmo
Vampire: animated GLB, stages, clip videos	`assets/models/vampire/pixal3d_test/v2/` · `game_final.glb` · `clips/*.mp4`
Dwarf: animated GLB, stages, clip videos	`assets/models/dwarf/pixal3d_test/v2/` · `game_final.glb` · `clips/*.mp4`
Scripts (pipeline, rig, bake, grounding, renders)	`assets/models/vampire/pixal3d_test/scripts/`
Gemini notes on the three videos	`assets/models/vampire/pixal3d_test/video_notes/`