Somebody has to look at the picture

An asset pipeline checks a lot of numbers: bone counts, animation lists, bounding boxes, file sizes. The numbers were usually fine. The defects were in the picture.

A rig arrived twenty to thirty times too large. A muzzle flash had been modelled into the gun, so every frame fired. The exporter kept only the active animation and quietly dropped the rest. Each passed every assert written for it.

The fix was dull. Every asset gets a rendered capture, and the capture gets opened and read. Making an image proves nothing.

Other projects reached the same rule the same way. A phone app had four screen defects behind 343 passing tests. A game’s notes put it flatly: asserts have never caught a visual defect there. Captures have.