dance-pr-evidence

name	dance-pr-evidence
description	Standard for how character-animation PRs present visual evidence: before/after render grids, true-speed GIFs, movement-curve comparisons, and panel scorecards embedded directly in the PR body/comments. Use whenever opening or commenting on a PR that touches a dance clip, a rendering pass, the blend/transition machinery, or any shared runtime mechanism affecting the rig.

Dance PR Evidence

Every PR that changes character animation must let a reviewer judge the change from the PR page alone — no local repro required. This is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have (owner, 2026-07-03/07-05): images and GIFs go in the PR description/comments as embedded markdown, never only as a link to an external Artifact page.

What every animation PR needs

1. Root cause + fix, in prose — the same reasoning that would go in the commit message, repeated in the PR body so a reviewer never has to open a terminal.
2. Before/after render images — see dance-render-artifacts for how to generate the grids/sheets. Render "after" from the current branch; render "before" from a git worktree at the PR's merge-base for just the touched files, then restore the branch's files.
3. Before/after loop GIFs, true playback speed (see dance-render-artifacts for the 50fps GIF-format ceiling and the dense-sequence recipe). Label which is which.
4. Movement-curve (motion-trace) evidence for any claim of "more/less X" — a before/after crop of the relevant channel with the printed range/events-per-second numbers, not just "looks better."
5. Panel scores, when a review panel ran — a compact table (lens x clip/handoff, min score bolded) plus the verdict's most load-bearing sentence, posted as a PR comment once the panel completes (panels are often still running when the PR opens).

Building the PR body

• Host rendered assets in the separate matthiasn/dancing_cats-docs repo as PNG — do NOT commit them into this code repo (owner, 2026-07-07: keep the code repo lean; webp had rendering issues, so use PNG). Clone at /home/parallels/github/dancing_cats-docs, drop images under images/reviews/, commit + push to its main, then reference them by https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matthiasn/dancing_cats-docs/main/images/reviews/<name>.png. Because they live on that repo's main (not a feature branch here), the URLs are permanent and survive branch deletion — --delete-branch on merge is fine. Use descriptive, move-scoped basenames (e.g. buga_weightcommit_after_grid.png).
• Downscale is optional (separate repo), but keep grids reasonable.
• Reference them with standard markdown ![alt](url) in gh pr create --body-file <file> (write the body to a scratch file first — heredocs with $(...) inside markdown tables get mangled by the shell).
• If the panel hasn't run yet when the PR opens, say so explicitly ("Panel round N running; scores will be posted as a comment") rather than leaving the reader to wonder.

Example structure (adapt headers to the actual change)

## <title> — <one-line root cause/fix summary>

### Changes
1. <item> — <root cause, what changed, how verified>
2. ...

### <Channel> before/after
![before/after](<raw-githubusercontent-url>)

### Loop GIFs (true playback speed)
| Clip | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| <clip> | ![](...) | ![](...) |

### Panel round N (4 lenses)
| Clip | animator | rigging | mocap | coach | min |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ... |

### Verification
- Full suite green (N tests), full-repo analyze clean.
- <specific measured deltas, not just "looks better">

After opening

• Post panel results as a gh pr comment once the workflow completes, using the same table format.
• Also send the GIFs to the owner directly (SendUserFile) when presenting a round — the PR link alone is easy to miss.
• When a round only partially lands, say so in the comment (which lenses agreed, which held back, and why) rather than only reporting the mean.

See Also

• dance-render-artifacts for how to generate every asset referenced here.
• character-motion-review-panel for running the panel itself.