My first animation puppet

Last Post left Manny padded with moss and balsa wood and here he goes with his reaper cloth. After a bunch of trials and errors I finally settled for some black elastic fabric in order to minimize the "boiling": i.e. the undesirable move of the fabric from one shot to another. This elastic fabric is wrapping Manny's puppet and seem to be more or less stable.
I will probably need to pad it a little bit more with an additional thin layer of moss to stabilize some soft parts, such as the shoulders. The access to the replacement jaws is not as easy as I would like and I will need to loosen the hood to make it easier. But even with these last last trimming and adjustments, it feels like a big milestone has been reach: I have my first animation puppet (almost) ready for shots!

"But you're not alone! Every body here is just as dead as you!"

Manny Puppet: Balsa underwear

I noticed that when I started to work on something on the computer, doing a 3D model a a computer graphic, I gradually become shy of returning into the "real thing": working with my hands on concrete, material stuff becomes daunting. It's like walking into cold water... it takes time to get used to a less forgiving world without any "undo's", and also it takes time for the mind to settle for a more pragmatic (and somewhat less perfectionist) decision making process.

So let's put aside z-Brush and 3D modeling and return to what we came here for: playing with puppets. What goes below is largely inspired by the blog of Joshua Flynn.


The idea is to block out the volume of Manny around this mechanical metal armature. Most of his boddy will be blocked out with soft material, but in order to be able to grab and manipulate the puppet, it is important that some parts stay reasonably hard: The torso, and the pelvis.


Balsa wood is easy to shape and to adjust around the armature.

Then these wooden parts are glued around the armature and some soft moss are added to legs, and above the shoulder. I have left some wholes in place where I need to access the screw to tighten the ball-joint of the armature.

In order to provide a smooth support for the Reaper's tunic, I have cut one extra layer of foam from a flat sheet in order to do some sort of t-shirt.


Next we will have to learn so sew. I purchased some nice black fabric but have little idea on what to do with it.

Probably with have to enroll some help on the next part...

Puppet making: magnetic jaws

For easy mouth replacement, I have decided to go magnet. Here is the painted head and mouth set, with the magnet set within the two part of the skull. The magnetic pull is very soft, which should make the mouth replacement routine almost effortless, with little risk of displacing the puppet in the process.

Puppet Making: handicraft

I was first trying to sculpt/mold the hands around the armature, but I always ended up with a shape too plump for bare-bone hands. I have changed strategy by using the insulating plastic of electric wires. It's a bit gross but that will do.

Puppet making: Shoe shine

So... one of the first scene I will have to shoot is a close-up on Celso's shoes...

... and I thought I did a pretty good job with my first ever shoes sculpting attempt...

... until I got on Joshua Flynn's blog and saw this...

How humiliating... and stimulating... So I went back to my clay and managed to get to this...

By the way, the fact that I am sculpting shoes separately from the rest of the body hints that I am changing strategy... looking at Flynn's brothers amazing puppets (discovered thanks to a nice comment posted by Dead End), I really think I am going to give up with latex foam and try to do the puppet in fabrics instead... The above shoes would be used for making a hard mold and a RV silicon cast. looks easier than the foam latex way.

MoldMaking: Crash test dummie

So, given my less than perfect attempt at scultping Manny's body, I am now completely relaxed in pursuing the whole process, calling it a "dry run", and carrying on making all possible mistakes along the way.

This week-end was about creating a plaster mold out of the "frankein-sculpt" I ended up doing. The hobby community seems to have settled on "Ultracal" as being the ultimate plaster for mold-making, but I had to settle to a locally available, fast setting, gypsum-plaster.

The pro's are also using a so-called "Wed-clay" in the process  (see tutorial here from stopmotionmagazine), but here again, I had to settle for some locally available natural water based clay.

Well, in the ambient 35 degree Celsius where I am living, both the clay and the plaster seemed to be drying faster than I wanted. The natural clay was rather messy to deal with, and I had trouble to level it to the divide line of my puppet. As a result I created a lot of undesirable undercuts : whereby the puppet ended up being sunken a little to much in one of the half mold, making it impossible to release without breaking.

Oh, and I also forgot to create "keys" (holes on one side, bumps on the other) to facilitate the placement of the two halves. The plaster turn out to be very soft... and I don't think this mold will resist more than one foam-latex baking.

Well, the result is very amateurish but I think it should be good enough to mess with the foam latex curing part... which seems to be the hardest craft to master in this type puppet making. I will most likely end up with a shapeless blob but I am picking up some ideas to do better on the second try :

1 - Will sculpt the master shape in Supersculpey, instead of air drying clay, then bake it to harden, and will send the shape to pistol lacquer painting (at a motorcycle repair shop), to get the smoothest surface possible

2 - Will use Kid grade synthetic clay (comes almost cheaper than natural one where I leave) in the mold making process, instead of trying with natural clay. I will just warm it a little in a rice cooker to make it very soft. Kid clay worked very well when I made silicon molding for the corners (see earlier post). It will be more forgiving for puppet molding as well... just need lots of it.

3 - I need to settle for a plaster than does not dry so quickly... and maybe ask the plaster shop if there is a way to mix it with more gypsum powder to improve its hardness.

Puppet making: disaster in slow mo

This part of the project is NOT going well at all. Atually, puppet making seems to be my biggest drag at this point of the project.

I posted earlier about my first attempt to sculp a suit in Manny's clay. It looked great... when it was still wet!

The cracks appeared as the clay shrunk on the wire armature. So I made some repair with some putty epoxy, which is very hard to shape. Never mind, I thought, will just sandle everything back in shape, so I patched heavily over the cracks.

But the epoxy turns out to be much harder than the original clay, and sanding back 2 materials of very different hardness proves to be an impossible task.  So here am I... Actually, the picture does it a favor, it really looks worse in reality. So long for the smooth, doll-like, detailed sculpture that made me salivate in the tutorials I tried to emulate. If only I could... lacquer it to give it a smooth surface... or dip it in some sort of all-forgiving-and-viscous-elixir.

Well, since I will probably screw up my first plaster-mold-making attempt I might as well consider this as a crash-test-dummy candidate.

Now, I need to find some non-shrinking clay and some damn good sculpture 101 tutorial.

Mouth Sets fresh from 3D Print

I just received the Manny's head and mouth set from the 3D printer. This time the skull and the jaw fit perfectly... well, at least for 4 among 7 mouth pieces. I don't know exactly how I managed to mess with the dimensions of the 3 others, but these are being re-printed promptly.

I will soon be able to make a true, stop motion lips-sync test, just like the one I did virtually earlier.

On another front I am having the time of my life learning the ropes of silicon mold-making. Translate: disaster on first try.
But that's another story for another post, with some sticky pictures of the mess I ended up with.

I said a few month ago that I was expecting to start to shoot sometimes in march. Well... give me another 3 month, OK?

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".

Puppet making: Iron man evolution

Left: Manny's clay modelling armature, Center: Manny's animation armature, Right: Celso's animation armature

Just finished Celso's animation armature this week-end.

So, how are we going to dress up Manny and Celso? I keep pondering on that one. And, for Manny in particular, I have a problem.

Animation puppets can be padded with foam, then dressed up with puppet clothes, but fabrics tend to be messy for stopmo animation : It does not stay in place and move from shot to shot.

Ideally those animation armature would be dressed in molded foam latex: a flexible foamy material with a realistic (non porous) skin, think stress-balls. But the process to get there is long and tedious :

1. First a clay-modelling armature must built with the same dimensions as the animation armature. This is what you can see in the picture on the left.
2. Then master shape of the puppet is molded and sculpted around the armature.
3. Then a 2-part mold of the clay-sculpted "master" is made in plaster
4. Only then the animation gets placed, somehow in the middle of the inverted body shape of the mold, and some scary 5-part cocktail of chemistry is poured into the mold. The whole thing is placed in a oven (but given the toxicity of the stuff, NOT your kitchen oven) and after some curing, fuming and foaming the puppets can be released from its mold and
5. finishing, imperfection corrected (i.e. bubbles), painted.

I have never done anything like that before. And most of the recommended ingredient for this magic are not available where I live.

I take this opportunity to pay a tribute to  John Ikuma from Stopmotionmagazine.com. John has made a serie of incredibly informative and well produced tutorial which make the whole process look almost easy. Most of what I know about the craft is coming from him. John, if you read this blog, a big THANK YOU! Your website and Youtube channel are best of breed.

So what's the problem about Manny?

Well... in the end of the movie, Manny undresses. He removes his reaper cloak to be revealed all his splendor in a business suit! That sequence is going to be very tricky. I need to make a black reaper cloak that can be undressed (that will have to be fabric, no choice) and have Manny inside wearing a suit (ideally in painted foam latex, but the process looks scary). And don't get me started on these pneumatic leg-extenders. How the hell am I going to build this?

Well I guess, time is on my side...

Puppet making: Chay's take on Celso's skull

Celso's CG 3D sculpt by Chay

Yesterday was my birthday, and incidentally I had a great gift awaiting in my inbox. Chay is a very talented graphic designer and a GF fan. Chay has apparently mastered a radically innovative 3D modelling software called zBrush which allows you to sculp model pretty much the same way you would with clay (adding matter, bloking out, smoothing, chiselling).
I approached him after seeing a great fan-art 3D rendition of Manny's character, and he generously accepted to help this project.
It's always embarrassing to ask an artist to deliver a work in the same style as another artist, but I wanted some design consistency with Manny's existing skull model and I sheepishly asked him if he could stay close to Tom Beg's own fan art rendition of Manny's skull.
I am really amazed by the model that he sent me, not only it is beautifully executed, but it also falls right in the stylistic "spot" which I was hoping for.
This GF-Fan community is amazing.

Puppet Making: The making of replacement mouth

After careful consideration, Tob Beg's original 3D model, as great as it is, would not do the trick in its lower part for stop mo animation purpose. Even without the teeth, I could not find a way to convincingly model the mouth within its model. I took the decision to remove the lower part of his model, and to remodel a jaw/chin that would give me a little more breathing space for modeling my replacement mouth set.

10 units of this rather unimpressive piece of molded resin has were cast after an original jaw-chin shape that I did in clay to complement the now mutilated model shown in pic 1. Having 10 identical pieces like this will allow me (I hope) to make all my replacement mouth on the same baseline. If I am molding each replacement mouth separately, I am afraid that the shape will change too much from one shot to another while Manny's speaking, making the animation very jerky. OK, it might still be jerky in the end, but at least I made an effort to avoid it!

I am using SuperSculpey Firm. Not my choice, but because this is the only pro clay that I can find around. It does the trick, however. I simply roll a piece of Super Scupey flat so has to get a skin of about 1mm think.

That skin is used to wrap the jaw piece around.

It's really like wrapping a gift. The extra material is cut away with the hobby knife.

This outer-skin made of Sculpey will be our sculpting surface. Being one millimeter thick we can choose to either sculpt-in the existing layer, as shown above for the teeth...

... or add material on the skin to add details, such as shown above. No it's not a Mexican mustache, it's the beginning of the surrounding lips.

Now you see what I mean. I could have left the lips protubing like this, giving it a comical effect reminiscent of the animation Aardman Animations (Wallace & Grommit, Chicken run)

But instead I have opted for sinking the lips into the skin as shown above... hoping not to make a too wide departure from the original Manny, who, after all, had pretty flat mouth features!

Puppet Making: Mouth replacement set (1rst trial)

Here are a first set of (unpainted) replacement mouth for Manny. The learning curve is stiff, and I cannot say that I am fully satisfied with the result. But this will be good enough for doing some lips syncing test runs. I will probably re-do a better set for production purpose...

In a separate post, for those interested, will share the process in excruciating details. Hopefully some professional mouth replacement gods will drop by my blog and will point me toward the light. In the meantime, I will stubbornly hone my craft in the darkness.
  

Puppet Making: Celso's armature proportions

After yesterday's "Usual Suspects" lineup, here is the adapted armature for Celso. Same height as Manny, different body shape.

Puppet Making: Early tackle on Celso

"Do you recognize any of these skeletons Ma'am?"

The day-job has been in the way lately. But the project keeps moving slowly and surely : The set needs to be dressed up and some materials have already been identified. I am thinking of using some snooker-table type of textile to emulate the dark blue carpet in the office, while doing the walls by simply pritting out a pre-shadowed wall texture on cardboard paper and gluing the sheets it to the wall, like a normal wall-paper.


I have also started to think about Celso Flores, a minor character of the game, but who is the main dialog partner of Manny during the intro-movie that we want to re-create.  While both Manny and Celso are about the same height, Celso is much more anatomically correct than Manny (yet far less alluring!), with higher pelvis, shoulder, and a far less elongated skull. This difference of body shape will affect the armature design , which will soon follow.

Puppet Making: Manny's stand up

Intimidating? Me?

As promised, Manny's skull has found its skeleton. The armature has been purchased in Kit from Animation Supplies from the UK. Andy, the e-shop owner, has been very responsive in the purchasing process and the quality of the kit, its instructions, and the comprehensiveness of the package (down to the Threadlock glue, and the epoxy glue to be used, and tools) left little to look for to build the armature in a few hours.
Of course, I did all the mistakes, like cutting the rods a tad short, but this amazing Threadlock glue allowed me to make up for the shortfall in lengh by not screwing the threaded rods to the end of the balls and sockets... the Threadlock glue keeping eventually everything tight in place.
Yet, after a few manipulation, I realized why some animator prefer good old plain wire armature : beside the fact that it's a cheaper option, it has also the advantage of not loosening after a few manipulations. I have the feeling that I will have to re-tighten now and then the pressure plates to keep the right level of tention at the articulation, which might be problematic when the whole armature get casted in a thick layer of foam latex. I will have probably to find a way to leave access points, which promise to be an interesting extra difficulty for the casting of the puppet.

Manny's skull in the matter

At last, after weeks a fumbling with 3D images, I am touching concrete, material, stuff! I have just received my 3D prints for Manny's head, based on Tom Beg's original modelling.

What a satisfaction to hold Manny's skull in my hand.


As you can see there are 2 models: one, based on the original artwork from Tom, with teeth, and the other one without teeth. The latter will be the master shape based on which I will make a Silicon mold to create many other heads. The mouth cavity will be used to place sculpted replacement mouths to give Manny's ability to articulate via lips-sync.

A word about 3D printing: I have in fact tried two well established 3D printer : shapeways and i.materialize. Both companies had kick-ass customer support and delivered high quality product on time for about the same price. Shapeways' product smoothness was however slightly better... but very close.

Unfortunately, 3D printing remains fairly expensive and can be used only for fairly small objects. Manny's computer desk for example, would cost several hundreds dollars to 3D print because of its bulky volume. That said, for small, intricate shapes, such as puppets head or Manny's computer, 3D printing is an option to get the props done.

Original fan-art by Thomas Beg

Manny's skull : printer 3D ready!

I just heard back from the guys from i.materialise... well it did not turn out to be straightforward to get Tom's skull printed... as the design was not intended for 3D printing : it was not waterproof (i.e. the model had tiny holes), the wall thickness too thin, and the "normals" where inverted in the eyes (whatever this means). Luckily the guys from i.materialise have been super helpful in helping me fixing the model to make it print ready. So with a bit of luck, I will have Manny's Iron skelleton and polyamide skull flying to me over the next 2 weeks. What a great encounter this will be! Manny has never been so close to be reincarnated.

Manny's armature

Manny's body will be articulated with a metal armature. I have chosen to buy an armature kit Animation Supplies.net The puppet will be 25 cm tall, which is consistent with a set built at a scale of 1/7th. The trick is that Manny's body, as you recall, has not an anatomically correct body: he is short on his leg, which is the reason why DOD has given him some pneumatic leg extender to help him do his job more credibly as a reaper. I have therefore redrawn Vectorially the anatomically correct scale drawing given by Animation Supplies, found some descent original concept art for Manny that gives me a good stand-up view of Manny's silhouette on Grim Fandango Network (thanks guys for your concept art collection), and finally adapted the lenght of some parts of the armature. I now know also that Manny's head will have to be about 7cm from scull-top to chin-bottom.

Removing Manny's teeth

In this earlier post, I marveled at the 3D remodeling made by Thomas Beg as part of its CG arts studies. Well, I contacted Thomas to beg (no pun intended) for the source file. Not only he replied, but he very generously sent the Maya and Obj source file of his model. Well, thanks Thomas, that's very cool of you. The source files were in Maya. I have not clue about 3d modelling and this software looks very scary. I downloaded the demo version which gave me 30 days to inspect the model (even though Thomas had given me the Obj export as well). And.. aha!, I discovered that the teeth were modeled as separate object and very easy to remove! A teeth-less skull could prove to be very useful for mouth replacement purpose. Next step was simply to export the teeth-less Manny from Maya into an Obj-file, resize it using a cheap 20 USD tool called Accutrans 3D (I was incapable of finding the scaling/sizing function in Maya using a good old metric system) and then send the model to a 3D printer, place the order... et voilà! I should receive Manny's head within 2 weeks. This 3D printed model will become the master model based on which I will sculpt the replacement mouths, and also do a silicon mold for creating many more heads for replacement and other puppets.