Asset contract

What a character must declare for the compiler to place it.

The central rule

The solver never sees artwork. It sees only a geometric contract. Everything the layout engine needs — how tall the figure is, where its mouth is, which region a balloon must not cover, which way it is looking — is declared as data. Rendering consumes the same contract afterwards.

This is what keeps rendering swappable: the same panel can be emitted as debug wireframes, as vector puppets, or eventually as hand-drawn artwork, with byte-identical layout in every case.

Skeletal puppets

A character is a skeleton plus parametric limbs, not a picture. A pose is a named set of joint angles, so pointing is data rather than a drawing — which avoids the combinatorial explosion of one image per pose per expression per facing direction.

units_per_head: 100

landmarks:          # vertical offsets from head_top -- the crop lines
  head_top: 0
  eyes: 40
  chin: 100
  shoulders: 130
  chest: 200
  waist: 330
  mid_thigh: 470
  knees: 560
  feet: 750         # 7.5 heads, standard adult proportion

joints: {root, pelvis, spine, neck, head, shoulder_l, elbow_l, wrist_l, ...}

parts:
  - {bone: upper_arm_l, shape: capsule, length: 90, width: 24}

face:
  exclusion_radius: 65      # balloons may never overlap this circle

gaze:
  origin: eyes
  default_dir: facing

poses:
  standing_neutral: {...joint angles}
  arms_crossed: {...}
  pointing: {...}

Derived at compile time

Forward kinematics resolves the skeleton into, per actor:

Output	Used by
World position of every joint	Rendering
mouth anchor	Balloon tail termination
Face exclusion circle	Balloon placement (infinite cost)
Gaze vector	Balloon placement bias, looking_at resolution
Bounding polygon (hull)	Occlusion cost, inter-actor spacing

facing mirrors the puppet about its root X axis; anchors and the gaze vector mirror with it.

Landmark requirements

Every landmark named in the shot table must be present and monotonically increasing from head_top to feet. A puppet missing a landmark cannot be framed with the shot type that crops there, and validation rejects it rather than guessing.