A cartoon character you can actually animate
One character, from a part-by-part brief to a T-pose front SVG to a rigged puppet in GroundSlate. It is drawn to your show's style kit, with a mouth chart that lip syncs to a real recording, hands that gesture, a costume, and a voice on its avatar, so a scene gets body and voice from one id.
Build me a cartoon character in GroundSlate profile <<PROFILE ID OR NAME>>, for a show called <<SHOW NAME>>. The character is <<NAME, AGE, WHAT THEY DO, AND THE ONE SENTENCE THAT MAKES THEM FUNNY>>. Their silhouette is <<THREE SHAPES: ONE BIG, ONE MEDIUM, ONE SMALL>>, and they talk like <<HOW THEY SPEAK>>. Make the show's style kit first if there is not one, from these reference frames and what to take from each <<TWO OR THREE FRAMES: LINE, EYES, PALETTE, SHADING>>, and show me the swatches beside the reference. Then write a front brief whose Visual Idiom is copied from that kit (line rule, ink, shading, proportions) and whose CHARACTER section is this person part by part: <<PALETTE OF THREE COLOURS; HEAD SHAPE AND RATIO; FACE WITH EYE SIZE AND EYE LINE; HAIR AND FACIAL HAIR; NECK; TORSO WITH ITS RATIOS; SHOULDERS; ARMS; HANDS; LEGS; FEET; THE FLAT-BLACK SILHOUETTE; THE ONE CONTRADICTION THAT MAKES THEM FUNNY>>. Show me the brief before you draw. Then draw one T-pose front SVG with a named group for every movable part, and show me the front on an HTML sheet (the face at three times size, the whole figure, and the flat-black silhouette) before you cut a puppet. If I already have vector drawings that are a T-pose front, or an SVG another model drew from this brief, start from those: check them against the brief's checklists with evidence and redraw only what fails. Do not trace a generated sheet. Set the style kit's stroke policy to match how the front is drawn before you cut. Cut the approved front into a puppet, in the spirit of <<A SHOW OR STYLE>>, give them a mouth chart, hands, one costume, and an avatar with a GroundSlate voice, and prove the mouth moves on a real line. Send me the turnaround, the expressions and the mouths when they are done, and tell me what did not resolve.
A cartoon character here is a rigged puppet: a skeleton with an SVG drawing on every joint, a chart of mouth shapes a recording can drive, hands that change pose on a beat, and a costume that dresses the same bones. Its voice sits on the same record, so a scene asks for the character once and gets all of it. The sheets you review are HTML pages, and the film is those pages captured, not a generated clip.
This is the single character version of The front that can be rigged and The cast that reads at a glance, for when you have one character in mind rather than a whole show to cast. It writes the front brief from the kit, draws one T-pose front, and shows it to you before cutting a puppet.
If your show has no style kit yet, the ask builds one first. A character drawn before the kit exists ends up drawn twice.
If you already have a T-pose front with named groups, drawn by a person or by another model from the brief below, start from that. The ask checks it and cuts it instead of redrawing it. A generated bitmap sheet is reference only. Do not trace it.
Everything in <<double brackets>> is yours. Fill it in before you paste.
- The brief does most of the work, and its Visual Idiom comes from the kit, not from taste. "A tall thin rectangle in a blazer two sizes too big, square shoulder pads, a small round head" gives an agent a silhouette to build. "A middle aged man" gets you a generic body with a face on it.
- You approve the whole front, not just a face. Expect four or five rounds on that one SVG, each shown as the face at three times size, the whole figure and the flat-black silhouette.
preview_framerenders a single look in about a tenth of a second on a warm page, so trying a change is faster than describing it. - The brief works in any model that returns SVG. If the front it draws uses strokes, set the kit's
line.stroke_policytostroke, or the cut is refused. Fix the policy, not the drawing. puppet_doctorcatches the basics: rectangles and ellipses used as anatomy, a uniform stroke where the kit says filled outlines, a mouth shape with no fallback, a costume that dresses a joint in one view and misses it in another. A puppet can pass every check and still be ugly, so look at it.- Hands are a chart of poses. A cut-out show draws a few and swaps them on the beat, so ask for the ones your character needs: a point, a fist, something held.
- Bind the voice to the avatar, not the scene. Every future scene and its lip sync then read it from the same id.
- Review GroundSlate's render, never the agent's own picture, and check the joins: a limb segment's hidden end has no stroke so a bent knee shows no line, arms draw in front of the torso with the shoulder end open, and a part that spins is its own joint at its own centre.
- Give the character one saturated hue in the brief, big enough for the silhouette to carry. Without it, every agent shades with the kit's brown and the cast drifts to one colour.