PuppetMan: the Digital Shake Puppet
The puppet man animation was a concept I was working on with in Apple's compositing software Shake. I wanted to create a "digital puppet" if you will, and give an illustrative and marionette feel to the animation. I am not a 3D animator but I have always enjoyed animation especially the 2D traditional animation process.
I drew different parts of the character, cut them out and scanned them in. I built, rigged, and animated the characters in Shake. The animation you will see is all done entirely with scripiting; none of the keyframes were done by hand or manually. It has a nice smooth "motion graphics" feel. I want to see how far I can take this concept, so any critics and suggestions are welcomed. Thanks.
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http://www.sketchypictures.com/movies/puppetman/puppet_man.html
http://www.sketchypictures.com/movies/puppetman/finalIPOD.mp4
PuppetMan Movie Files
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http://www.sketchypictures.com/movies/puppetman/puppetman_breakdown.html
PuppetMan Breakdown Movie
The video files for some of these clips are in flash, if it becomes a problem I will upload a more standard quicktime version.
I finished the final touches to the puppet macro, basically it allows the user to animated the character using sliders and values. I'm working on a more advanced version and might post it, if anyone is interested to play with it. I'm curious to see what others would create with it.
