#1 Young Tree Folk
Of this first set of quick sketches, this one came out the closest to a male protagonist. I picture him with a dark brown woody skin and his hair as a bushy moss of some sort. He looks disconcertainly like Rand Paul to me, but maybe I can add in a little Ru Paul to even things out a bit.

I would need to do a study to figure out the breaklines near the chin. I'm guessing this character might need a small section of silicone skin to allow the upper lip to deform into a smile




#2 - Young Water Folk
I did a few quick female characters but this was the only one was worth showing - still need to find a groove with this class. It's not drawing women that is difficult really, but we draw such a fine line with beauty that when you start to exaggerate features, things quickly start to read too harsh. I feel like it takes quite a bit more care to come up with effective ways to portray women without falling into traps.

As a consequence, this young princess-like character was quicker to get to. I'll work on building out a more even gender representation.


#3 - Tree Folk
This dude is all hair. There doesn't need to be that much underneath, just enough to keep the shape defined and let the wig do the rest.

I know this guy looks maybe more Scottish than Irish with the braided hair. Can't decide if he's an homage to Henson's Animal or the Addams Family's Cousin It. Either way, I kind of like him, except maybe the spectacles - was having trouble deciding on an eye treatment. Couldn't resist giving him a bald spot with a flower growing out of it. Not sure why.




#4 Tree Chief
This guy came off as being very serious. After getting his lower face worked out, I decided to give him sort of a crown-like helm that looks like he chipped it out of his own skull. No doubt he's a teddy bear on the inside, but I like the idea that he looks as rough as sandpaper.

I kind of feel like his nose is a bit too human - kinda want to make it look like part of a tree trunk or somehing. Probably just needs some textural detail and color to make that work.


#5 Tree Prince
As I was working him up I was focused on keeping his mouth small with facial hair to help cover the break lines and he came out rather prim and refined-looking, so I gave him a crown-ish head-piece. He ended up looking more like a young prince than a king. Not sure there needs to be much royalty anyway, so he may be heading for the bench.

I have been thinking that the tree folk build up their camouflage as a symbol of status and maturity, adding elements and including physical objects physically attached to the skin. I'll detail that out in the future.




#6 Trickster
I was mainly focused on giving this character a dead-tree-looking headpiece and a slightly longer face than the others and he came out pretty Grinch-like. That's not necessarily bad, but I'll probably look for ways to make him less reminiscent of other characters on the next pass.

As with a number of these, the brows are likely to require a different approach than I discussed with Rai - I'd need to look at each one individually to figure out a viable path.


#7 Rock Folk
I didn't get very far with the rock-based characters. My first thought is that they are less hairy overall, but have interesting and unique 'tufts' of hair and are more focused on using small stones to accent their features and with tatoo decoration. I like the idea of using small stone-like shapes for eyebrows in particular because that opens up some additional options for how to make eyebrows with broader expression using elastic material between or underneath each hard element.




#8 Rock Folk
This isn't a particularly good example, but I like the idea of introducing tatoo art for the rock folk not unlike that of Maori tradition. I've been a fan of that stylistic body art since I was a teenager and feel it works well with Gaelic decorative traditions.


#9 Hair Shapes
I started playing with large hair shapes a bit. As you can see from some of these examples, I introduced spirals into the design quite a bit, often with hair curls. I'm not totally sure how practical that is, but I like the idea.

This quick sketch probably demonstrates what not to do. With the presentation constraints we've set, it's going to be rare for the audience to see the figure in profile, so making things most interesting in that plane may not be the way to go. Having the face-front shape read as interesting is probably a better direction to focus on.






#10 Questions of Anatomy
You have to cover a lot of cultural ground when doing story and character work. Some of the looks I experiment with, while working with variants of humanity, tend to have an ape-like quality - the result of squashing and protruding the muzzle, creating deep smile lines that connect the nose, mouth and chin, exaggerating brows and lips, etc. I'm doing that on the one hand for mechanical design reasons, but also because I genuinely like forms that aren't flat - I naturally prefer shapes with some meaty topology. Unfortunately, that can result in bringing up questions of ethnicity and racial stereotypes that have often been portrayed negatively and which I would certainly not want to reinforce. My opinion is that it is the negative protrayal that is the root of those issues and not the forms themselves. For the moment at least, I've chosen to manage that category of issues through character development and storytelling and not get too bogged down into over-anglicizing the character features themselves. I don't buy into eugenics at all, so would rather meet it head on and utilize a wide range of forms responsibly rather than dance around those concerns and make all characters look like Anglo-Saxon royalty. Still, I know this is sensitive territory for many. Others will certainly have different opinions and I welcome discussion on the subject.


#11 Young Rock Folk
I kind of like this little guy. He has a baby chimpness about him (see issue in #10), but maybe with a little refinement I could age him up just a bit and give him a bit more maturity so he could hold a position as protagonist, like perhaps a best friend to the young tree folk character (#1). Pairing them up might be useful so they can communicate to the audience through each other as they go on their journey to find out what the good and bad of humanity is about.




So now I think we have enough feedback on the technical side to go back into story and character development. I'm going to toss Rai here into the trash bin and come up with something else (sorry Rai - another time dude). It would be great to have an intellectual property that meets our requirements, so let's invent one.

As I was thinking about this next part of the project this morning I remembered a story treatment I'd done back in the mid-80's when I was first moving toward character animation. At that time, I'd been reading a bunch of Irish folk tales and some of the history behind them and really liked the idea of Pookas, Banshies and Leprechauns as real societies anciently respected, then unfairly demonized to squash pagan beliefs and then over time totally forgotten except in nursery rhymes and fairy tales - then suddenly thrust back into dealing with the modern world. Anyway, the concept revolved around fairly small, exaggerated characters that keep themselves hidden from humans most of the time as an integral part of the narrative. Thirty five years later, the storyline could certainly use an update, but I think its at least consistent with our needs here to justify using the concept as a prompt.






As a story framework I'd like to sprinkle in something I've been mulling over for a while now... What would happen if a tribe of homo floresiensis (the 'hobbit' people archeologically found on the island of Flores) showed up today, confronting and being confronted by modern society. How accepting would we be? Would we accept them as human - as equals? It seems to be a rich row to hoe given the challenges we still seem to have within our own very narrowly varied species in getting past subtle differences in skin tone, anatomy and culture. Sifting homo floresiensis through a filter of Irish folklore is, in my mind, a way of presenting it to a larger audience through character animation in a manner that is a bit less literal but, hopefully, still powerful. The intention is to use the art form for its strengths. To do the work of art - to get people to think - and be viable as a commercial commodity. The connection with the science of archeology may or may not be explicitly made clear in the storytelling, but it feels to me like a good foundation to build upon.

Anyway, that is my thought - to merge our changing understanding of human development with folk tradition and then work that into a storyline that has relevance but doesn't hit the nail too much on the head. And then pretend that has been turned into a film - a popular film while we're fantasizing - that justifies using the IP for location-based entertainment pop-up animatronics.

Although this started out as basically a technical exercise, I don't see why we shouldn't just grab the bull by the horns and follow the project as it evolves. Since, so far, this is really just a conversation I'm having with myself, I'm going to keep driving that evolution. I welcome any input from any source that has an interest in engaging and possibly steering this in another direction.



Here's a sketch of Rai's head. We'll start from the top and work our way down. First the hair, then the brows, then the eyelids and pupil motion. Then the mouth and jaw.

I don't actually remember what I was going for when I did this low-res model. I have a bunch of versions of this character. This 3D rig has different proportions than many of the other versions (for another project). That might have been because I was using it for a game prototype and the character was older than my original design, so I aged him up a bit - longer lower face and smaller eyes. Anyway...



I'd like some passive motion in the hair. I hadn't included this yet in the Passive section of the Function List, and it could easily cause complexity and weight issues, but i'd still like to consider it. Rai has these large cog-like (or ray-like) sections that are fairly geometric and have quite a bit of mass. I'd like those elements to give a bit as the head moves around. Not too much, I don't want wobbly jello, just a bit of organic waving.

This video shows what I found a few feet from my desk to use as a movement demo. It's not perfect, and in a real-world situation I would've mocked up a sample mass shape too. However, it's a good example that you don't always need to put a lot of time and money into mockups if quick-and-dirty gets the point across effectively.




We haven't gone over show timing or performance layout yet, so for now let's assume, just to have something to work with, that Rai will...
(1) ocassionally pop up as if he is startled by something,
(2) look around,
(3) deliver 1-3 lines of dialog, then
(4) sink back into his hiding spot.
We'll assume that he has a fairly dynamic, energetic voice and just to maintain some design sanity, that he'll deliver his lines at a moderate speed - no machine-gun delivery. We want the figure to be able to keep up with the dialog so they work together well.

Something we want to avoid is having the finished figure appear 'flat'. There needs to be enough compound movement to bring a character to life. Here is a Snowball figure that has primarily planar head motion that is slow and sparse for the dialog (you'll have to imagine that, since I muted it) and there isn't any juxtaposition with the body - all focus is on the eyes and mouth, weak areas for animatronics that scream for misdirection support. This is in a queue, where Guests have a moment to stop and stare, and they aren't far away, so scrutiny is pretty high.


Don't take the example above as a critique of the show it is in or even that specific figure. For one thing, figures can easily have functions that aren't working, are temporarily turned off for some reason or any of a dozen other factors that can impact a performance on any given day. I just saw this recently on a Guest video posted to YouTube. It's quite possible that on the day it was shot the figure wasn't 100%. And a lot can happen to impact performance throughout the design an production process, which is the point. Understanding these factors should inform design even in the early stages to make sure we get the performance expected. Note that I muted the audio because the dialog wasn't clear (lots of ambient noise). This is just meant as a general example.

The point is that there needs to be a balance in the functions that make up a performance. Too much reliance on just eyes and mouth and you'll only be able to hold the stage for very specific staging options for a pretty short amount of time. For a full-sized, fully-loaded human figure the common functions available really only are effective at keeping the upper body, arms and head alive - the hips and legs only provide supplementary movement that help the chest and shoulders move appropriately. It's best to hide the lower body or de-emphasize it as much as possible unless extraordinary steps are taken. In this case, we are mainly selling the face, but similarly need the larger head controls and some support from the torso to keep the figure alive for most staging situations.

And so we come to a dilemma. We would like to have facial expression functions to break the common expectation that animatronics have puppet mouths and dead, mechanical-looking eyes. That is a very important design objective. At the same time, we know that our giant head on a pencil neck needs good control for the three main common head functions, Head Nod, Head Turn and Head Tilt. Now, human heads have a more complicated motion gamut than those 3 axis, but I can say with some confidence that even if we just go with commonly used functions we will be hard-pressed to build a working, reliable figure based on the stated project requirements. I guess before I get any farther I should identify common animatronic functions that are going to be applicable to this discussion:

Basic Common Functions - The orange dots represent axis that most animatronic developers and vendors are familiar with.



Head Functions

 • Head Nod - Rotation near the base of the skull on the X-axis (Y-up).
Imagine having to lift a basketball super-glued to your index finger - with just the muscles in your finger. And then add the requirment that it move very quickly up to 90 degrees every few seconds, with shorter moves in between, both snappy-fast and smoothly-slow. Most of us couldn't even lift the basketball, much less make it move like a character should. That's basically the type of design challenge we ask of engineers, and the Head Nod is often one of the bigger asks because of the power and control needed to meet those requirements.

 • Head Turn  - Rotation on the Y-axis (Y-up) below the Head Nod (order matters).
Although the same factors of speed, mass and power apply generally to all functions, physics plays a big role. The Head Turn, generally, is less impacted by gravity on human figures than the Head Nod, and because the actuator can often be placed in the chest (unless there are additional neck functions involved), power is often less of an issue. Even the large range requirement (~160˚) isn't usually a big problem in terms of actuation itself. The bigger problem with the Turn is usually in getting the neck to look natural, whether it has to deform skin or move against a collar.

 • Head Tilt - Rotation above the Head Nod on the Z-axis (Y-up).
The Head Tilt is often the first to be cut of the major head functions. This is because the Head Nod and Turn are fundamentally required for orientation, and the Tilt is 'just' for expression. Unfortunately, expression is the whole point, and the Head Tilt is critical to express attitude as well as countering torso movement to create juxtaposition. So it isn't really an expendable function. But because of the design challenges of having three large head functions for packaging, power/control and figure finishing, there is often a lot of pressure to cut the Tilt.

 • Neck Forward  - Rotation on the X-axis (Y-up) at the base of the neck.
This is a pretty rare function, mainly because it needs to be above the Head Turn and introduces both packaging issues and also adds to the weight and control problem set (now we have two fingers moving the basketball, one on top of the other). But it can help too. It allows some of the Head Nod work to be distributed over two functions, which has mechanical and aesthetic advantages. And you can support broader vertical orientation and even do 'goosey' things with the head, which can both be very helpful to a performance. Naturally I would also love to have a Neck Side-to-Side function, but to date have never had that as a possibility, so I won't list it here.


Torso Functions

 • Torso Forebend - Rotation near the stomach on the X-axis (Y-up).
Similar to the analogy made with the Head Nod only now we're lifing a 100lb. weight with the equivalent of one arm. Fortunately, most of the time the big weight is balanced straight above, but when it drops way forward, the forces get big very quickly. We are going to need some type of function on this axis to keep our character from looking like a popsicle on a stick. Maybe not as much range as we would need for a full-sized human, but maybe 40˚-60˚ or so to give an indication of his ability to move forward and back and to counter head moves when needed for expression.

 • Torso Twist  - Rotation on the Y-axis (Y-up) below the Torso Forebend (order matters here too).
Whether or not we need a full Torso Twist for this application is debatable. We might be able to get by with just having a low-power control to rotate the shoulders and haven them generally move proportionally with the head. This would hopefully be less complicated and costly than a full Twist, and would often be used to counter the Head Turn to keep the shoulders still or subtely turning with the head instead of moving in the same proportion all the time. This approach will only really work if our requirement of having no arm functions is maintained (at least in the common anatomical sense), as the shoulders would likely be passively constrained by whatever ends up acting mechanically as 'elbow' and/or 'wrist' connection points out of Guest view.

 • Torso Sidebend - Rotation above the Torso Forebend on the Z-axis (Y-up).
This may be expendable. Ultimately, like the Head Tilt, it primarily acts to create attitude and counter-balance. Although an angular juxtaposition against the Head Tilt is advantageous, the position of the Torso Tilt may start to introduce collision and binding issues in this case, so it should be considered carefully. Perhaps this, like the Torso Twist, could be thought of as more of a 'shoulder indicator' rather than carrying the full weight of the torso. If the shoulders were just tilted a bit on the Z-axis - more like pivoting a stick at a center fulcrum (near the base of the neck) than moving a whole figure, it would likely give the impression of some of the attitude juxtapositions the animator might want to use, without the additional mechanical complexity.

 • Pelvis  - Rotation on the X-axis (Y-up) at or just above the hips.
The Pelvis is important on full-sized humans, partly because we can't get enough speed out of a Torso Forebend to make many saggital gestures, partly to help counter the Body Foresway for balance, and partly to give some movement at the hips, which tend to be overly stiff, along with animatronic legs (for a number of reasons I'll get into in future posts).


Facial Functions

 • Jaw - Rotation between the organic jaw pivot and a point forward on the X-axis (Y-up).
One of the common catch-22's in animatronic design is that no one likes how the mouths look - they are too 'puppety' and yet design teams generally want to call this one function the 'mouth' and not deal with the issues involved with adding more functions. This isn't an irrational dynamic - making a mouth look good is really, really hard. There are tons of obstacles, not the least of which include skin/fur deformation, mechanical reliablity, packaging, and the list goes on. And then there is a simple fact that nothing we've every tried really makes a good 'OO' change into a good wide smile (again, it has to do that over and over without tearing).
The result tends to be that the Jaw function has to try and cover all of the things the mouth does. Putting the pivot back at the natural jaw pivot point just makes it look terrible if that's the only function you have. So we move the pivot point forward so if you squint it might look like its a little bit of lip motion along with the jaw movement. And then we have to animated the figure to help with that conceit - skipping some syllables and accentuating others to try and make the lack of complexity any more noticeable than it has to be. It's an imperfect solution, but one that still takes quite a bit of care and craft to make it more, rather than less, effective.

 • Lip and Smile functions - The mechanical strategies can vary dramatically.
Upper and Lower lips tend to be rotations, curling in and out from the neutral position. Most often, curling toward the teeth is limited or eliminated to avoid collision with the teeth. Smiles might be separate actuators (often ganged together in control) to go in and down toward a small frown and then out and up to a semi-broad smile position through the neutral position. It's pretty rare for these to work effectively, and have a history of being turned off when mechanical problems occur. This is unfortunate, as organically accurate shape changes in lips are desparately needed for the majority of animatronic figures. It's just a tough nut to crack.

Note: The 'neutral position' can mean a few things and I'll elaborate at another time - but here I'm talking about the position of no-resistance for the face skin/fur that should correlate to a neutral expression that the figure remains in when it isn't active. .

 • Pupil Right/Left & Up/Down - R/L on the Y-axis and U/D on X (Y-up).
For naturalistic humans the pupils aren't all that hard to manage. Our nearly spherical eyeballs and flat faces provide a pretty solid baseline for making the mechanics work, although the range of the R/L is often not quite enough to get to the corners. The challenge with the eyes is in how the eyeball/pupil assembly interfaces with the face skin and eyelid assemblies.

There is a basic rule of mechanical design for high-duty-cycle applications (like theme parks): Things that move can't touch other things. This is an extremely unfortunate rule and maybe the one that has the most significant impact on animatronic design. It certainly is problematic when it comes to the mouth and eyes. Basically, there has to be a gap between the eyeball and the lid. And if the eyelid is a separate mechanism from the face skin, there has to be a gap between the lid and skin. These gaps look awful. Our eyes constantly 'lube' our eyeballs to maintain a nice smooth surface for our eyelids to rub against, and I suspect that there is still an awful lot of cellular upkeep to keep our lids and eyeballs in proper working order. We don't get that (yet) in the mechanical world, so even with tight tolerances eyes still look pretty nasty.

And that is for normal human eyes. Abstract characters break lots of physics rules, with non-spherical eyes that can't easily rotate on two axis, and even if they could, would have the eyeballs collide inside the head. The result is often less range of motion of the pupil, which is exactly the opposite of what abstract character need to stay on-model.

 • Eyelids - Rotation on the X-axis (Y-up).
The eyelids are inextricably intertwined with the eyeball/pupil design. Commonly only upper eyelids are used for humans as the lower lid motion tends to be subtle by comparison. But with abstract cartoon characters, those rules change quite a bit. Oversized and oddly-shaped eyes make it harder for a singly lid to cover the space and do so as quickly and reliably as needed, and the level of expression is usually more demanding on the lower lids as well. So it's more common to have upper and lower lids on abstract characters. A challenge here is that the closed eye look usually requires that the lids reach a specific shape, and going from that shape to the acceptable open-eye shape on either side can be problematic. The bottom line is there are always a bunch of problems to solve with the eyes for any given character design, just as there are with the mouth.

 • Brows - The mechanical strategies can vary quite a bit.
As humans, we can't really do that much with our eyebrows. Some folks have more ability to create variation than others, but basically there is a relaxed position, a subtle drop for furrowing, some small ability to 'knit' the brows toward the center and crease forehead skin a little, and a fairly broad movement of the inner brow up into the forehead to indicate surprise, fear and excitement. Not a lot of complexity, but still, just getting that human range-of-motion can be a challenge, mainly due to the need for a very elastic material to accomodate the stretching needed for 'surprise' and the tight tolerances and firm attachments needed around the lids and eyeball.

Abstract characters ratchet up the difficulty tremendously, as cartoon eye expression breaks lots of rules to exaggerate all the small, subtle cues in human expression. Cues that originate with a slight furrow and knit get abstracted into changing eyelid shapes to accentuate anger/focus along with having the entire brow ridge collapse down over the eyeball. Cartoon vocabulary completely re-writes the real-world motion for dramatic impact, and that then has to, somehow, be designed into our physics-contrained mechanical design. Some days that just seems incredibly unfair. To the point that we look for other ways to address eye expression. More on that tomorrow.



Wow, this got long fast. Tomorrow I'll discuss how these functions apply to my sample character and prep for some initial 3D motion tests in Part 3.



In that specific project the container was dressed out as part of the show. Meeko was designed to support a specific script and also pop out for photo-ops with Guests after the show, but could have been programmed to support more variability in presentation. All elements, figure mechanics, power, playback, audio, communications and f/x were packaged within the basket. The mechanical design was specific to Meeko and his performance needs – the concept would have applied to other applications, but we didn’t specifically generalize the design for a broader set of characters and performances.


During the Blue-sky on a studio-driven project, my role initially would be to listen a lot - getting an understanding of high-level stakeholder requirements and gently help steer ideas based on experience, risk and opportunity. Design considerations include IP (intellectual property - any existing characters owned by others and licensed to the project), practical show design parameters, ride design, R&D technology breakthroughs, short and long-term park development strategy, THRC (Guest throughput) targets, and dozens of other factors. Basically, there are inputs coming from all directions at once. Most ideas end up in the trash bin. Finding ideas that have legs with the myriad of competing half-baked and brilliant thoughts (often both at the same time) is no small feat, and this all happens in a very brief period of time - everything is changing dramatically daily. Doing all this with a sizeable creative team is part of the magic and miracle of this type of work. It's a messy process.

But for this little sample effort, I’m going to set somewhat arbitrary technical and performance boundaries so we can focus on some of the details regarding how figure target decisions evolve.

• Talking Heads - Expose Head and shoulders only. Any Torso motion is really to make the head look viable and imply that there is a whole character out of view.
The reason behind this is that with existing technology we can't really approach a full-sized, full-body figure and meet the other requirements. And animatronics aren't usually nearly as successful in the area of lower body as the upper body. This is a generalization, as we could address specific performance needs in various ways, but in general that is true, so in terms of design complexity management, this seems like a reasonable starting constraint. We are trying, at this point, to find the best 'band-for-the-buck' approach to this class of figure.
• Lift Included - Lift movement to appear that the figure is standing up, raising or lifting their head (pick one).
The purpose of the lift is mainly to keep the figure hidden when not on on stage. Having the container seal the mechanics and figure finishing inside something that provides some level of protection is also a really good idea, particularly if the figure might be deployed in an exterior area.
• Arm Movement - None or Not Much - Arms either not shown, kept down or limited to brief, simple gestures with elbow hidden.
Arms represent a high 'barrier of entry' in terms of performance vs. mechanical complexity. Outside of simple little throwaway gestures (e.g. a vague hand wave to one side or the other) achieving convincing arm gestures takes a bunch of overlapping axis of control. Also, when in a confined space, arms tend to cause collision problems when any little thing goes wrong. So if a story can be told without big broad arm movement, or if the arms can be justifiable constrained by staging (holding onto things) it makes things much less complicated on the engineering side. In this case I know there are going to be a bunch of weight and packaging issues anyway, so it's going to be advantageous to keep arms off the table for baseline design and then bring back any show-specific requirements later.
• Facial Focus - Facial expression functions are critical to success, but must also support significant weight constraints to keep head motion effective.
Without a lower body or arms, there's an awful lot missing in terms of gestural gamut, so in addition to needing to have good range and speed control over the head, getting effective facial expression is really critical. This is going to be challenging, as every ounce of weight will impact other performance options, but having some complexity in the eyes and mouth is probably the best way to build back performance quality after giving up so much.
• Juliette Box Guest POV - Limited Guest POV cone, constrained to 120˚ centered front of figure center and roughly 10'-15' above Guests.
The figure doesn't necessarily have to be as high as a traditional Juliette box, but in most cases, based on our initial assumptions, we won't want Guests to know there is a 'robot-in-a-box' so the container needs to be hidden. It's much harder to hide something that is level or lower than Guest sightlines, so having it placed above Guest view is a good place to start. Too high and we will start having trouble getting the figure into view over whatever is in front covering up the figurebase container.

And to reduce the need for a base turntable or similar additional functions to accomodate a huge range, a 120 degree viewing area generally centered on the front middle of the figure is decent. That gives us something to shoot for when we start to figure out functions and ranges that keeps things manageable. Note that if there is an interactive requirement, the function ranges can get eaten up pretty quickly, requiring larger range of motion specs to permit character animation in conjunction with orientation control to keep the control scheme from getting crazy.
• Plane-Jane Container - Undecorated protective container that essentially opens up and/or has sides fall away when the figure is deployed. It will be assumed to be concealed by show set elements.
Dressing out the container to blend in with the show set would reduce some of the design issues, but it would also mean that all uses of the figure would have to fit that one aesthetic. I'm hoping to create a template with more flexibility than that, so would prefer that the figure be generic enough to work effectively in dramatically different show environments. Also, much of the mechanism is intended to be fairly modular, so it may be possible to swap out characters quickly using the same base container if desired. Note that this direction assumes a fairly consistent scale and function set, so may be more applicable to some IP character sets than others.
• Self-Contained - May use external power instead of on-board battery power to reduce weight and power design complications. A small localized speaker will be included, but an audio-out connection should be included to permit external amplification as needed. Some form of positive mount is assumed to securely attach the figure to the set.
Dressing out the container to blend in with the show set would reduce some of the design issues, but it would also mean that all uses of the figure would have to fit that one aesthetic. I'm hoping to create a template with more flexibility than that, so would prefer that the figure be generic enough to work effectively in dramatically different show environments. Also, much of the mechanism is intended to be fairly modular, so it may be possible to swap out characters quickly using the same base container if desired. Note that this direction assumes a fairly consistent scale and function set, so may be more applicable to some IP character sets than others.

Tomorrow, I will be taking these initial baseline design assumptions and start working through some performance options - looking at function groups with notes on design risks and opportunities. That will be mostly an aesthetic discussion, but technical issues will creep in as well.

I'll also touch on the way these initial constraints might impact different character types, classes and IP's. Hmmm, sounds like I just described a thick book worth of subject matter. I'll have to breeze over some of it to keep things moving.

I'll use an old character I created back in 2003 (just because I own the IP - so as not to upset any lawyers). His name is Rai (way before the the Star Wars character was out) and I'll use a low-res game rig I did for him to work through some quick-and-dirty pre-vis performance and mechanical design options in the following posts.