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>
wuwiandClaude Opus 5
a58e8b18aa