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hero-art is a skill from the Summer skill library: a guide your AI agent reads when the task matches, so it builds the good version on the first try. Hero splash art, seamless splash loops and rigged animated heroes, gated.

When your agent uses it

  • Making splash art for a hero, champion or playable class: character select, hero page, loading screen
  • One splash looks weaker or more generic than the rest of the roster and must be redone in the same style
  • Animating splash art: an animated splash, a living painting, a seamless looping character-select background
  • Building a playable hero from approved concept art to a rigged, animated, game-ready model with secondary motion and per-platform budgets
  • A generated character has six fingers, fused hair, tears in motion, warps on its skeleton or looks low poly in game

Install

summer setup installs every skill for your agent. To add only this one:
Swap claude-code for your agent, such as codex or cursor. See Skills for every option.

The skill

Playable heroes (champions, classes, named leads) sell a game twice: on the select screen and in play. This skill covers the whole path, in three parts. Read the part for the job in front of you; each one stands alone. Order for a new hero: concept (splash-art method) -> the person picks -> 3D hero -> splash -> loop. A redo of a weak splash or a loop for an existing splash can start at its own part.

When NOT to use

  • A quick NPC or enemy where an auto-rig is enough: character-model.
  • A square dialogue or codex bust: character-portrait. Rough direction exploration: concept-art.
  • Store key art, covers and icons: store-art. A title-screen loop with no character: animated-loop.

Without Summer Engine

In a session without Summer Engine tools (the assets profile; the summer-assets skill has the whole loop), every generation step still works: the splash, its loop and the 3D hero up to the exported desktop and phone files. Skip the in-engine steps (import, the select-screen player, the scene wiring). Save each file where the person asked with out (the summer-assets skill says how) and tell them the paths and formats: the loop’s .ogv copies play in Summer Engine and Godot; a plain looping muted MP4 suits the web.

Rules for all three parts

  • The person’s eye is the gate. Make options, show them full size (images beside their references; motion as a video with one line of what to look for), and wait for the person to name the exact one. Never build on an image or a model they have not approved.
  • An approved design is locked. Fix only the defect they named; compare every edit side by side with the approved version. Edits drift toward plainer, stockier, younger; reject drift.
  • Fix at the source. Hands, hair, weapons and framing are cheap to fix in an image and expensive in a mesh or a video. When a method fails once, change the method, not its parameters.
  • Adults, attractive, on-model, in the game’s own art style.
  • No text, logos, frames or watermarks in generated art, and no caption about how it was made.
  • Spend is the person’s. Generation uses their credits: dryRun: true shows the cost; say what a batch costs before a large one. Long jobs answer with a job id: jobs.wait, never a second call.
  • Never overwrite approved or shipped files. New versioned files, then repoint.
  • Record the recipe (references, prompts, models, seeds, settings) in .summer/art-bible.md or .summer/memory/, so the next hero comes out the same.

From a shell

No Summer MCP tools in this session? Run each one as a command; when summer --version is missing or below 4.0, use npx -y summer-engine@latest in place of summer. Fields are flags in kebab-case (--scene-path res://main.tscn) or one --input '<json>', and summer ops describe <op> prints the exact input. The summer-cli skill has the rest.

Files in this skill

  • character-model: Generate a rigged humanoid (player, NPC, enemy, boss) from a T-pose reference, previewed before rigging.
  • character-portrait: Generate one polished character bust for dialogue UI, character select, lore cards or codex entries.
  • concept-art: Explore art direction with 3-4 rough concept variants of a character, environment or prop.
  • animated-loop: Generate a short seamless video loop: splash background, animated logo backdrop, idle title screen.
  • retarget: Apply animation clips from one rigged character to another: one clip library, many models.
  • character-animation-wiring: Wire a rigged character end to end: real clips and bones, locomotion states, method tracks, root motion.
  • animation-tree: Wire AnimationTree state machines and blend trees: locomotion blends, attack interrupts, hit reactions.
Source: library/skills/hero-art/SKILL.md, rendered from summer-engine@4.9.2 on npm.