It’s time to start assembling all the components for the scene. This is requiring a lot of sketching, in the main for the 2 characters and the backdrop. For the woodcarver character I used a sketched template to cut out parts from black card stock. The parts included a body, 2 legs, an arm and a head. Sounds complicated, but it only has 2 control rods, one connected to the arm, the other connected to a leg, and the body position is easily controlled between the two rods. The head pivot I connected to the arm pivot with a 4-bar-linkage and a rough ratio of 3:1, so the head moves subtly with the arm. (Thanks to Alex and Olmsted’s wonderful video.) The final leg I left uncontrolled, thinking it could be subtly influenced by surface friction, gravity, and also the axle/pivot it shared with the controlled leg. After a few practices I decided to attach it to the the other leg with some thread (added after the below photo was taken), and then it could freely move but not too far apart.

wood carver sketch

For the squirrel I used a sketch as a “reference image” in Blender to create “grease pencil” drawings of the squirrel in parts. These drawings were simple dark shapes with a few cutouts. The body, the head and the tail were separate drawings, i.e. separate “grease pencil” objects in Blender. The head and tail were attached to the parent body at a pivot point, and all transforms were locked except for rotation. I decide not to use vertex groups or bones to animate the squirrel this time, to simplify the animation code as it manipulates objects. I gave the squirrel head a “constraint”, limiting the range of rotation, and also created a “driver” for the value of the rotation so that it pivots slowly in the opposite direction to body rotation. The effect is, if the squirrel is flat to the ground, it looks forward, but if it stands up it looks more towards the woodcarver. This is perhaps a digital equivalent of the 4-bar-linkage. So the movement file (that will eventually contain timings and instructions based on the AI’s choreography) only needs to control the squirrel and it’s tail, and the head will move sympathetically. Finally I duplicated the squirrel and gave the second squirrel an acorn, thinking the second squirrel can be swapped in after the acorn pickup, rather than having to worry about adding more Blender movement code to pick something up.

After all that the largest thing left is the scenery. I’ve pencil sketched it and again will use it as a reference image in Blender to create a grease pencil drawing. I’ll also need to create the block of wood that evolves into a statue, perhaps a separate set of drawings and just use Blenders standard animation (using the “dope sheet”) to fade in and out successive drawings.

I expect there to be only one more post after which the scene will be complete. This should cover how everything comes together, the Blender scene and objects, the movement and subtitles, and how I’ll integrated the physical shadow puppet with the Blender rendered scene.