Saturday 21 January 2012

Puppet Making : Mouth replacement set (trial 2)

A few weeks ago, I have presented on this blog a mouth replacement set for Manny made by hand in Sculpey clay. But I was still not very happy with the outcome: the match between the lower jaw and the upper skull was approximate, leaving big gaps which will prove to be hard to conceal.

At the same time, I was intrigued by Celso's skull made by Chay in a 3D software that he recommended to me: zBrush.

Unlike a conventional 3D authoring software, zBrush lets you sculpt intuitively shapes without worrying about meshes of polygon : it's a bit like using some digital clay.

I decided to give a try on a trial version, starting from Tom Beg's original 3D model skull for Manny.

As you can see, I had a lot of fun with it. It took a little while to get through the beginner's learning curve, but once you get used to a few (among many) brushes it gets really intuitive.

The advantage of this method, would be to be able to make a very clean, precise, and consistent cut between the skull and the mouth set, and get the pieces sent to a 3D printer. The fit will be almost perfect, and the remaining contact line will be more easy to conceal in post-production.

Now it gets really tempting to have a set of upper skull (i.e. with different position of eyebrows), to de-multiply the possibilities facial expression. But I am getting ahead of myself... as my father always taught me: "le mieux est l'enemi du bien".

4 comments:

  1. Brilliant. You seem to have quite a knack for picking up different skills quickly. With the red colour of the "clay" it also looks like some kind of Manny totem pole :)

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  2. Hey cpl...

    Yeah, it's a funny line-up... In this brown color It made me think of african masks. I just mounted those pics in my Lips-Sync software... Now I can watch Manny talking to me. spooky!

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  3. If you don't end up buying zbrush, you can try Sculptris, Pixologic's free version of zBrush.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks... good to know... zBrush is a very expensive piece of software.

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