Ink Demon: First Animation Test and Update!

Good morning, y'all! We're in the home stretch on the Ink Demon this week as we wrap things up and push for the final details. This week a lot happened!

We completed the duct tape form and tin foil body shape, though we decided not to do the additional layer of spray foam and to just build out the finer details like his ribs, muscles, fingers, etc. using more tin foil. It leaves a slightly different texture but gave us WAY more control over the details than the spray foam would.

We also built the hands using bendable armature wire, which is slightly different than the steel galvanized wire we use on the body form. It's easily bendable which means even after the tin foil and silicone outer layer we can still easily pose the fingers! That's the hope anyway...

With the body done, we then wrapped up assembling the head which included designing a custom jaw rotation mechanism that's driven by an air cylinder.

Basically it lets us open and close his mouth with the prop controller along with everything else Finally, we put him all together and ran our first full test! (See video at the top.)

Not completely unexpected, but even though it worked GREAT we still managed to snap the neck on the 3D printed head. We're still getting the hang of fine tuning the pressure and speed of the pneumatics and I basically just gave it too much power and broke it... 😫

Fiberglass to the rescue! Put it all back together and we're back on track. (Hopefully...)
And now we're onto the home stretch and the final details. First we base coated it all black with some spray paint and then got started applying the silicone.

  Excited to get this thing wrapped up so we can show you the final result!! The video should be out on Wednesday the 15th. Stay wicked everyone!

~J&J