Let the boots follow the feet.
A weight repair reduces the Wickkeeper’s collapsing boots and smooths robe transitions. Adapted backward and sideways clips extend the accepted captured walk.
Shaun preferred the Mixamo trial’s movement, but the stronger poses exposed a problem in the existing skinning. The cloth-weighting region reached the boots: a moving foot and a cloak bone were pulling parts of the same boot in different directions.
4 October follow-up: feet on the ground
Vessara now times her steps against measured foot travel, with bounded planting and terrain adjustment in Unreal. Gameplay speeds stay unchanged. Matched packaged captures show substantially less sliding during walking, sprinting and backsteps; fast sideways travel still slides. Casting and the other wizards retain their existing motion. The new comparison stays with the local playtest; the Blender image above documents the earlier weight repair. Human judgment of the faster cadence remains open.
A smaller repair
Blender now restores leg influence around the boots, limits that correction near the robe hem, and smooths nearby weight transitions along connected geometry. The mesh shape, triangles, UVs and materials are unchanged. Staff and lantern weights are preserved, and Unreal MCP confirms the same bone hierarchy and material slots after import.
Across sampled sprint poses, the 95th-percentile boot-edge distortion ratio falls from 3.59 to 1.11, where 1 means the edge retains its rest length. This is a local skinning measure, not a score for the entire character. Sampled walk, idle, directional and four casting actions also improve on that boot measure.
The other directions
Backward and sideways movement now use adaptations of the captured walk already retained from Mixamo, with directional foot paths fitted in Blender. An attempted new download was blocked by the browser, so these are explicitly adaptations rather than three newly acquired motion captures. The accepted forward walk, sprint and idle clips remain unchanged.
The separate Mac package passes 1,300 gameplay checks, 88 injected native-input checks and 34 local host/guest checks across both maps. A matched fourteen-second packaged comparison covers movement and blending; a further twelve-second capture exercises the existing casting gestures. The previous playtest app remains available.
What remains
The severe boot stretching is reduced, but some robe creasing remains. Foot sliding is a separate problem: gameplay travel speeds are unchanged and terrain-aware foot locking has not been added. The other three wizards retain their existing meshes and clips. Human playtest judgment of this repair remains separate from the automated and captured checks.