Colour is arithmetic: match each frame onto the anchor instead of asking for it

The character-as-image fix landed and did NOT close the gap, which is the answer
I promised to report rather than paper over. The brute's serve sheet came back
with his build, his garments and his DARK TONES PIXEL-IDENTICAL to the anchor —
(56,56,32) both — and his big pale shirt two shades brighter, (200,200,184)
against (176,176,152). The model was looking straight at the character. It held
identity perfectly and re-lit the largest flat area anyway, because every call
re-renders and re-rendering re-lights.

No prompt fixes that. Six gates spent a day trying to make a generator do
arithmetic.

So the arithmetic happens here now. Pair each of a frame's dominant colours with
its nearest anchor colour, fit one gain+offset per channel across those pairs,
apply it to every pixel. Pairs further apart than NEW_COLOUR are dropped from the
FIT — colours the anchor genuinely has not got, i.e. blood on a fresh wound — but
they still RECEIVE the transform, so a wound stays the right red relative to the
body it is on. The gain is clamped so one odd pair cannot posterise a frame.

PROVEN ON THE REJECTED FRAME BEFORE SPENDING A SINGLE CALL, which is the
discipline I skipped all day: the frame that measured 20.0 away passes after
correction, its shirt pulled from (200,200,184) to (176,176,160).

And the order is now CORRECT, THEN CHECK — the palette gate is a safety net for
what arithmetic could not fix, not a tripwire for what it can.

The model this leaves:
  the generator, given references  ->  identity, pose, composition
  the pipeline, deterministically  ->  exact colour
  the gates                        ->  layout accidents only

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

assets/_master.py

@@ -65,6 +65,7 @@ def build(name, frames, scale=2, gap=90, pad=70):
 # master: the reference specifies eleven poses that already work, and the prompt only says who.
 import json, shutil, collections
 
+# THE FIRST SHEET describes the character in WORDS, because at that point no picture of it exists.
 RESTYLE = (
     "The reference image is a {n}-FRAME SPRITE SHEET of one zombie tennis player. Redraw THE WHOLE "
     "SHEET as a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ZOMBIE: {who} "
@@ -75,6 +76,28 @@ RESTYLE = (
     "There is NO TENNIS BALL anywhere in any frame — the game draws the ball itself, so the hands and "
     "the air are empty and the poses are the same as if a ball were there. "
     "Output exactly {n} figures side by side in ONE horizontal row, all on the same ground line. ")
+
+# ...AND EVERY SHEET AFTER IT DESCRIBES THE CHARACTER WITH A PICTURE OF IT. This is the whole fix.
+# The brute's three sheets each restyled from the master independently and each re-derived "pale
+# grey-green work shirt" from the same paragraph, so the game got three different brutes and the
+# palette gate — correctly — refused two of them. A paragraph is a lossy specification of a
+# character; the character is not.
+#
+# It is also the pattern that already worked: the racket zombie's own play sheet was generated from
+# [z_c1, o_idle1, o_run1, o_swing1] — the character as an IMAGE, the poses as IMAGES — in one call,
+# first time. I had it, and then did not use it for variants.
+RESTYLE_KNOWN = (
+    "The FIRST reference image is THE CHARACTER — the exact zombie to draw, and the ONLY source for "
+    "who it is: its build, its bulk, its height, its clothing and every colour of it. Copy that "
+    "character exactly. "
+    "The REMAINING reference images are {n} POSES, and are there ONLY to show what the body is doing "
+    "— never who it is. "
+    "Draw THE CHARACTER FROM THE FIRST IMAGE in each of those {n} poses, in the same order, at the "
+    "same size and the same distance from the camera, all facing the same way. The character never "
+    "changes; only the pose does. "
+    "There is NO TENNIS BALL anywhere in any frame — the game draws the ball itself, so the hands and "
+    "the air are empty and the poses are the same as if a ball were there. "
+    "Output exactly {n} figures side by side in ONE horizontal row, all on the same ground line. ")
 STRIDE_NOTE = ("In particular frames 2 and 3 must stay what they are in the reference: ONE DRAWING "
                "SHOWN TWICE with only the legs different — everything above the hips identical "
                "between them, the legs clearly swapped, and the two frames NOT identical copies. ")
@@ -117,12 +140,16 @@ def variant(key, who):
     seed = lambda src, dst: shutil.copy(os.path.join(HERE, src + '.png'), os.path.join(HERE, dst + '.png'))
     made = []
 
-    def batch(name, sprites, refs, subject, stride=None, changed=None, newart=False):
+    def batch(name, sprites, refs, subject, stride=None, changed=None, newart=False, lead=False):
+        # `lead` means the first reference is THE CHARACTER and not a pose — it is shown to the
+        # generator and is not one of the frames asked for, so it is skipped when pairing references
+        # to outputs (both for seeding and for the run-time baseline in _regen).
+        pose_refs = refs[1:] if lead else refs
         # Only the sheets drawn off the MASTER are seeded here. A chained wound stage is seeded by
         # _regen at run time, from whatever its reference has become by then — seeding it now would
         # score it against a copy of the master, two steps better than the stage it follows.
         if newart:
-            for src, dst in zip(refs, sprites):
+            for src, dst in zip(pose_refs, sprites):
                 seed(src, dst)
         spec = dict(sprites=sprites, ref_only=list(refs), check='loose', anchor=0, subject=subject)
         spec['newart' if newart else 'state'] = True
@@ -139,11 +166,16 @@ def variant(key, who):
         print(f'{name:16s} <- {refs[0]}…   {", ".join(sprites)}')
 
     K = 'z_' + key
-    # --- the whole body, restyled off the master
+    # --- the whole body. The PLAY sheet invents the character from the words; serve and fall are then
+    # drawn from the character it produced (K+'1' leads their reference list) plus the master's poses.
+    # That ordering is why the three must be run in the order printed at the end.
     for part, frames in SHEETS.items():
-        batch(f'{key}_{part}', [K + f[3:] for f in frames], frames,
-              RESTYLE.format(n=len(frames), who=who) + (STRIDE_NOTE if part == 'play' else ''),
-              stride=[[1, 2]] if part == 'play' else None, newart=True)
+        first = part == 'play'
+        refs = frames if first else [K + '1'] + frames
+        batch(f'{key}_{part}', [K + f[3:] for f in frames], refs,
+              (RESTYLE.format(n=len(frames), who=who) + STRIDE_NOTE) if first
+              else RESTYLE_KNOWN.format(n=len(frames)),
+              stride=[[1, 2]] if first else None, newart=True, lead=not first)
 
     # --- the two wound stages, each chained off the one above it
     WALK = ['2', '3', '4']            # shuffle A, shuffle B, forehand — the wound rows' three frames