Hello! Today I would like to share some of the process photos I took while working on the puppet for my master thesis.

This guy right here is my puppet subject: Stig, a witch and a werewolf consultant.

This was one of the final concept art pieces I did of him before I 3D modelled him, set his face up with blendshapes, 3D animated a lipsync and then picked out all the expressions I would need to replicate the animation in stop-motion (tragically, I don't have any pictures of the digital modelling process anymore because my harddrive wiped itself clean when it died in January. Remember to back up your harddrive OFTEN).

And here are the 32 faceplates (24 lower plates, 8 upper plates) I ended up with! Printed in white, photopolymer resin on a Photon Mono X 6K in four batches if I remember correctly.

I then handpainted the resing using acryllic paint and glued a paper clip, mangled into a specific shape, to the back of each lower plate that would connect to a tiny magnet inside the back of the head of my puppet, keeping the faceplate from just falling off during shooting.

All done! Here's a little test expression:

And here's the inside of his head! Scary!

I ended up using fixed in place eyeballs with movable pupils instead of fully articulate eyeballs as I ran out of time to figure out the mechanism needed to make the latter possible.

That's it for the head mechanism, now for the rest of the body. Here's a shot of some freshly demolded hands:

Like his head, the hands were also 3D printed, to get all those veiny details, and then cast into a mold. I then placed some aluminum wire skeleton hands inside the mold and poured the silicon over. After they were done, I painted them with some proper silicone pigments to make the skin feel more alive. 

Finally, I sculpted the rest of his body out of foam blocks, and covering the foam up with a sweater and a pair of hyper detailed tiny jeans, all hand-sewn. B)

And here's he is, all ready for his shooting!

I made a mistake by painting the background of the scene a plain black, while he's wearing black clothes, so it's a bit hard to see his full shape. But overall I'm very happy with how he came out.

And finally, here's the animation!

Thank you so much for reading!