Built an AI-powered Sprite Rigging System that Breaks Characters into Poseable Layers

I've been working on a technical challenge: how do you pose pixel art characters without gaps or distortion?

Traditional sprite animation requires drawing each pose by hand. I wanted to see if AI could help automate this while preserving the pixel-perfect quality.

Here's the approach I developed:

Step 1: Skeletal Analysis

Claude Vision analyzes the sprite and maps out body regions (head, torso, limbs) with joint positions. Uses weighted Voronoi assignment where spatial distance is weighted 3x higher than color similarity - this prevents the head from bleeding into the torso or arms crossing region boundaries.

Step 2: Layer Decomposition

This was the tricky part. Each body region gets extracted into a complete layer, but parts are often hidden behind other parts. The system uses AI inpainting to intelligently fill in the occluded pixels (like the torso behind an arm), then remaps everything back to the original sprite's exact color palette using LAB color space for perceptual accuracy.

Step 3: Forward Kinematics Posing

Instead of moving pixels directly, it now moves complete layers. You type a pose description like "waving hello" and Claude generates target joint positions. The system calculates how each body part should translate to reach those targets, then composites the layers in proper z-order.

The result is gap-free character posing that maintains pixel-perfect quality. No stretching, no color drift, no manual cleanup needed.

I'm curious about other approaches to this problem. Has anyone tackled automated sprite posing before? What techniques have you used for maintaining pixel art integrity during transformations?