BlueCaptain Placeholder — Blender Setup Guide

A Blender script that procedurally builds the BlueCaptain placeholder character — a chibi-proportioned figure out of primitives, with a 19-bone armature, 73 meshes, and fifteen posed copies laid out to match the ArtBible action-pose sheet. No manual modelling and no weight painting: every mesh is bone-parented, so it is posable the moment it finishes.

It exists so gameplay, animation and equipment-swap testing can proceed in Godot while the final stylised art is produced separately. It is intentionally simple and will be replaced.

Three scripts, and you only run one.

All three must sit in the same folder. If the script cannot find its siblings it says so and lists every directory it tried; set SCRIPTS_DIR at the top of the main script as a last resort.

Body and equipment are separate, which is the important structural decision. The body collection holds skin, hair, face and jersey — a complete character wearing no gear. The BlueCaptain_Equipment collection holds the helmet, gloves, skates and stick as overlay items. Hide it and model replacements in place; the body underneath is untouched. That split is also what Chapter 31's equipment system assumes.

Nothing here is invented. Every proportion and material is read off the ArtBible:

The character sheet beats the category sheet. The generic helmet page shows cages on most designs; the Blue Captain does not have one, so cages sit behind BUILD_FACE_CAGE (off) for a later equipment variant.

Two things that are often conflated, and the ArtBible separates them, so this does too.

Materials are roughness and metallic, not just tint. Helmet plastic is glossy (roughness 0.18), jersey fabric is matte (0.88), skate blades are the only truly metallic part (metallic 1.0). Those numbers come from the material callouts on the three sheets above and live in MATERIAL_PROPERTIES. It is most of what makes a primitive read as gear.

The palette atlas is a single small image of flat colour swatches, with every mesh UV-mapped to the centre of its own swatch. The whole character then needs one material and one texture — cheap, and it imports into Godot without fuss. Re-colouring later means editing a 16-pixel image rather than thirty materials. Region names follow the mask sets the ArtBible specifies (primary, secondary, two accents, decals, metal, rubber), so the placeholder and the finished art describe the same regions.

Set USE_PALETTE_ATLAS = False to keep one material per part instead, which is easier to tweak inside Blender. Both are kept; the flag chooses.

This is the part worth understanding, because the first version of this script shipped broken and could not have been caught here: the development environment has neither Blender nor Python. The geometry cannot be run; the arithmetic can.

So the numbers live in pure-Python modules with no bpy import, and Node verifiers parse and check them:

The posed-bone check earns its place: Blender silently ignores a pose bone name it does not recognise. A typo does not raise — the pose simply does not apply, which looks exactly like the script being broken.

The generator also measures itself at run time and prints every part's real bounding box through the depsgraph (so Subsurf shrink is included), with pass/fail lines for total height, head width, heads-tall and "lowest point sits on the ice". Read that report — it is the substitute for a test.

1. Open Blender. A new/empty file is fine — the script only ever creates or replaces objects it names itself (everything prefixed BlueCaptain_, plus the BlueCaptain_Rig armature), so it won't disturb anything else in the file.
2. Switch to the Scripting workspace tab along the top of the Blender window.
3. In the script editor's text area, click Open (folder icon in the header) and browse to:

   art/Blender/Scripts/generate_bluecaptain_placeholder.py

4. Click the Run Script button (▶) in the script editor header, or place your cursor in the text area and press Alt + P.
5. The script builds the full character + rig, then tries to save the result directly to:

   art/Blender/Characters/BlueCaptain/CH_BlueCaptain_BaseBody_v001.blend

   That exact filename matters — it's the path Godot's asset pipeline expects for this character. If the auto-save fails (check the System Console / status bar for a message), use File → Save As and save to that exact path yourself.

Switch to Godot, let it reimport, and check the FileSystem dock under art/Blender/Characters/BlueCaptain/ for the new .blend. Drag it into a test scene, or temporarily swap it in under PlayerModel in scenes/player_main.tscn to preview it against the current gameplay collision capsule.

Near the top of the script, two constants control the overall look without touching any of the body-building logic:

HEIGHT_SCALE = 1.0   # uniform resize of the whole character
HEAD_RATIO   = 0.34  # head diameter as a fraction of total height (higher = more chibi)

Change either, re-run the script (Alt+P again), and it rebuilds from scratch with the new numbers.

The script is idempotent — every run first deletes any previously-generated BlueCaptain_* objects and the BlueCaptain_Rig armature before rebuilding, so re-running it after a tweak never leaves duplicates behind.

Six runs in one evening, kept because the failures are more instructive than the result. Every one of them was caused by something invisible in the code and obvious in a screenshot — which is the whole argument for rendering early and often on a script that cannot be tested where it is written. This environment has neither Blender nor Python, so every one of these was found by the user running it and sending a picture back.

Source images live in art/ArtBible/001 players/base_player/, alongside the concept sheet they are chasing. They are a long way off it, and that gap is the point of keeping them.

The pattern across all six: not one was a modelling problem. Every single failure was a wiring problem — a parent type, a subdivision count, a material assignment, a part placed at the wrong landmark, an offset with the wrong sign. That is worth remembering the next time something looks like it needs artistic judgement.

The ArtBible sheet every number in bluecaptain_proportions.py is measured from: the 8-direction turnaround, the fifteen action poses, the 10-swatch palette, and the nine named materials. It is also the authority on two things the generic equipment sheets get wrong for this character — no face cage, and cyan eyes.

• Pose rotation signs are unverified. Nothing outside Blender can see whether a joint bends the right way. If the whole lineup is mirrored, flip ARM_FORWARD or LEG_FORWARD at the top of bluecaptain_poses.py rather than editing sixty numbers.
• It is primitives. No sculpt detail, no UV unwrap beyond the palette swatch, no finished silhouette. The helmet, gloves, skates and stick are gear-shaped volumes in the right places, meant to be replaced.
• No goalie variant, and no female variant, though the ArtBible has sheets for both.
• Facial expressions are not built. The ArtBible defines eight (neutral, focused, angry, happy, battle yell, confident, surprised, wink); the script builds one.
• Cages are off behind BUILD_FACE_CAGE, pending the equipment variants.