A younger Ioma, and the first one becomes her mother

Ioma has been mid-forties since the brief was written: grey-streaked, lined, tired. Today she got younger. The direction: early thirties, strong in spirit and cunning, attractive and intelligent, in the spirit of a young Jennifer Connelly, "strong but not a Barbie". The woman we had is not thrown away. She is the opening's teacher now, Ioma's mother, kept whole under art/characters/mother/.

Same clothes, a different woman

The brief's numbers moved with her: about twenty-five years between the child at the drawpoint and the adult, six or seven then, early thirties now. The Ashfold kit stayed exactly as it was, the ochre coat, the rust tunic, the belt, the waterskin, the rope, so the two read as related. The headscarf is loose at the neck instead of over the hair.

She is made the way every character here is made: a text prompt into an image model, three views, image-to-3D, an auto-rig with clips. Nothing hand-modelled. Two things changed in that pipeline:

• Features, not a name. The generator does not take an actor's name reliably and we do not want a likeness anyway. The prompt describes strong straight brows, light grey-green eyes, a defined jaw, a direct assessing gaze, sun and dust, no makeup, no lines.
• Four faces, one pick. char_gen.py --candidates 4 draws four fronts from the one prompt and stops; --pick n takes one on. One came back as a drawn turnaround sheet, two had the measuring rod over the shoulder and rope hanging by the hand, both of which image-to-3D fuses into the body, and one was clean. We took the clean one.

She lives in a desert

The first pass was too pale for someone who has spent her life under that sun. Rather than redraw her, --retouch edits the chosen front in place with one instruction and keeps everything else: pose, framing, clothes, face. Her skin came back a warm medium brown on face, neck, arms and hands alike, and the views, mesh and rig were made from that.

Through the mesh and into the saddle

Hunyuan built the mesh from the three views; Meshy rigged it and returned ten clips in one call, so they all share one skeleton: idle, walk, the two proper runs the ride uses, and the on-foot clips we will want next (a jump, a hurdle, bending to a fire, kneeling, talking, listening). The old Ioma borrowed her runs from a second rig; this one does not need to.

The ride picked her up with no code change: the same bone names, the same height. She sits, dismounts, walks, and her steps are detected from her own feet as before. At dusk she is a silhouette with a lit profile, which is the look, so here is the near side brightened to see her.