Experimental Animation - 3D Stop Motion Puppet Armature

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I used the same turn around and design for the base of the 3D puppet as I did for the 2D puppet. I printed it out in a couple different sizes to see how big I wanted the final puppet to be. I plan on making the puppet 10 inches tall.





Using the printout at the correct scale, I sketched the armature to use as reference. For the armature itself, I wanted to test out two main materials: 1.5 mm aluminum wire and 9.2 mm diameter plastic ball and socket armature. After cutting each material to roughly the right size, I started testing out each one's flexibility and stiffness.




The aluminum wire was much softer, and easier to bend and cut. The plastic ball and socket armature is a fair bit stiffer. It is fairly easy to snap the joints after letting them rest in warm water for a bit. As seen in the videos, the plastic can't bend at sharp angles the way the wire can, but it does feel sturdier than the wire. Unless heated, the ball and sockets aren't going to pop out or snap. I decided to go with a combination of the two, using the ball and socket armature for the spine and the wire for the limbs. Because the spine doesn't need to bend at sharp angles, the sturdy plastic felt like a good choice. Using the wire for the limbs should give them a good range of motion Because the wire has less resistance than the plastic, this should also mean that posing one limb shouldn't alter the position of the rest of the puppet too much. 




As for the connections and the bones, I again wanted to test out two different materials: epoxy putty and polymorph plastic. To do so, I made two combination plastic and wire armatures with the right proportions. I started with epoxy, since, according the packaging, it takes about 4 hours to dry completely. Using my sketch as a guide, I sculpted a chest connection and a hip connection to attach the wire limbs to the plastic spine. I then set it aside to dry for the afternoon. I did the same thing with the polymorph plastic. I found polymorph to be much easier and faster to work with. I was using disposable gloves when sculpting with epoxy. Disposable gloves are always way too big for my hands, so it made working with the epoxy annoying. The gloves also kept sticking to the putty as I was trying to work, so it felt like even more of a hassle to get the material to cooperate. Polymorph just needed boiling water, and I had to be carful handling it after letting it sit in boiling water, but it wasn't too bad. Polymorph hardens pretty quickly after pulling it out of the water, so it would be good for detailed sculpting, but for the gestures of the chest and hips it seemed to work great. It is had to attach new forms to the hardened plastic without reheating the whole thing, but if needed the hardened plastic can be reheated and reformed so that isn't too big an issue.  The polymorph armature was also lighter than the epoxy armature, which might be beneficial for the rig arm. I'm a little worried the polymorph doesn't stick to the wire limbs and plastic spine as well, so I plan on adding a little glue around those areas. 




The next step is sculpting the head, feet and hands.

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