Mythic Masters: animation hill climb, rounds 8+ (from #3708) #3710

Score: 3.75/10 (target 9, on the owner's halved scale: agent judges halve their number, per the 2026-11-05 reset)

Carries the animation climb on from #3708 (round 7, squash on impact), #3694 (round 6, flight posture) and #3219 (rounds 1-5); rounds 5-7 are PR #3693. Motion only: materials, lighting and effects are the graphics lane.

Where it stands

Round 5 made arms, fins and tails trail the body. Round 6 made winged bipeds fly chest down with their legs trailing; the flight-shot judge went 2 → 6. Round 7 made a blow flatten the body front to back and rebound, but the judge still saw no clear squash on the heavies. On bot-fight bursts the judges put the game at about 5-6 out of 10.

Next rounds, in order (the judges' top gaps)

1. Squash the judges can see. Round 7 flattens the body by up to 26% front to back (measured), but in bursts a struck heavy still reads as tipping rigidly (Sasquatch, Hodag under Yeti). Try a spine curl about the blow, a delay on the flash, or a burst cued 0.1 s after the hit.
2. Membranes that billow. Wings are stiff planks that hinge, folded edge-on most of the time. That takes more bones in the wing (a finger fan from blender/beast.py) or a vertex sag between bones. Every foot must stay a rig tip (bun run beasts). Sasabonsam's wing crumples into a shard pile in the flight close-up.
3. A flyer's forelimbs in flight. The arms hang straight down under a leaning body (Jersey Devil, Sasabonsam). Tuck them or trail them.
4. Limbs that whip. The lag reads as drag only, with no overshoot across frames. Try a stiffer, less damped spring on the arms.
5. No clipping. Wind-ups still pass bodies into each other (Yeti into Hodag, Black Shuck into Wampus Cat).
6. Grounded locomotion. Body bob and roll tied to each footfall instead of a sine. Rougarou often floats with one foot down or none.
7. The open-world walker's gait. Not judged yet: the walker is too small in frame. A closer camera for a harness shot first.

How the shots are taken

• bun scripts/burst-shots.ts <dir> <prefix> --combat runs one fight per archetype, cued on a wind-up and on a landed hit.
• With no flag, it shoots the art scenes (wings, contact, dragon) plus close-ups.
• --fly shoots the winged bipeds held in flight in the gallery, side on. A bot fight rarely catches one in the air.

For BEFORE, write main's src/beasts.ts (and any other files the round touches) into the working tree, shoot, then restore. Shots: docs/shots-2026-11-05-anim-r5/, -r6/ and -r7/. A fresh judge scores BEFORE against NOW on the five points; report half its gain. Bot fights are random, so judges credit unrelated points with variance: check what the round actually changed.