A Look At The V5 Updates
Overview
For about 9 months, I have been working on several updates to my shorts. These include design changes and puppet rig changes. It has been a long and tiresome process, but at the time of writing this I have finally finished the updates (October 2025). Honestly, it has been a relief to be done with this. I’ve taken a few days to relax and re-adjust. Smell the flowers and stuff like that as they say.
As I was finishing the update, I figured it would be cool to show a closer look of everything along with some commentary about it. The update is broken into 2 categories: Design and Puppets. Within these categories were several major aesthetic and functional changes that would help me be more efficient at producing shorts and enjoy the process of doing so. Here’s a rundown of the list of updates in change log format.
Design
Re-design of the human characters and animals
Simplify background creation and asset design
Re-make character hands to make them more functional and aesthetically pleasing
Re-make the style sheet to make it more functional
Update and standardize naming convention of all assets linked to production of shorts
Puppets
Streamline ability to draw unique assets within the puppets
Implement inverse kinematics to make animation more streamlined
Organize and simplify puppet node process and layout
Implement several new master controllers for easier control
Update and fixed curve deformers for ams and legs
Fixed transform information of hand pegs responsible for holding and dropping items
Fixed blink frame gaps that revealed the eye layer
Fixed gaps in torso layer
Updated clothing system to make replacement articles of clothing quicker, while reducing the computational load on the puppet
Added new “Omni Mouth” for higher quality lip sync
Implemented OGL controllers for easier selection of objects
Allow for eyes and mouth to pop outside of the character’s face
Streamline and optimize the puppets so that the rigs are lighter
Made the rig less computationally intensive
Plus many more smaller QOL changes
That’s not an exhaustive list of all of the upgrades I made. Even my update document did not contain all of the fixes made because a lot of them were done spontaneously in an effort to push the update as far as I could. Still, that’s a pretty good list and represents the bulk of the changes I tried to implement.
Now let’s take a closer look at the puppets themselves to see how these updates came together.
KS Puppet
This is the KSP, or “Kyle Samuels Puppet”. It is the master puppet and all of the puppets are based on this characterized version of myself. Needless to say, this puppet is the most important to get right. If a glitch happens in this puppet, it’ll be in 5 other puppets and it becomes a nightmare to animate with. A lot of the time I took in doing these updates were spent making sure I got things done right on this puppet. Also, the backgrounds and assets are designed around this puppet as well.
You can say this puppet is the center of my content universe.
Evolution of the KSP
Here’s the evolution of the KSP. It’s been almost 5 years of making shorts, and there’s been a lot of change. Initially a bigger head was desirable, but it was difficult to animate with and over time I’ve moved away from the bobble head ratio to something more manageable.
Updates to the hands
One of the largest pain points of animating with the older versions of this puppet were that the hands were kind of ugly and were difficult to make interact with objects and other body features. While re-designing the hands, I was inspired a lot by ‘Megumi Ishitani’ of One Piece anime fame. The design process evolved. Initially I went for much bigger hands like in the “One Piece Fan Letter” episode. Then I experimented with smaller hands, and ultimately settle with something in the middle. They both look and work a lot better now than they ever have.
Updates to the eyes
The eyes had a few design and functional changes. Now the pupils and brows are a touch smaller. I also fixed the blink frames to not have any gaps where the eye layer can poke out.
Updates to the head and torso
As I mentioned previously, the size of the head has become smaller. I think it looks better and it’s easier to animate with. Along with that, I made a lot of small changes to the torso and pelvis. Unfortunately I still have more work to do with these 2 groups in the V6 updates, but for now I think it works. The biggest changes were the rounded and smaller shoulders on the torso. I think it looks so much better now. Also I rounded out the bottom of the torso. It’s more noticeable when the puppet rotates. It does look a lot better and it’s simpler to animate. Win / win.
Updates to the leg and arm groups
Initially I had smaller updates planned for these assets: merely updating the pegs for better FK. Somehow and someway I ended with actual and functional reverse kinematics for both the hands and legs. I wrote a blog about this specifically you can read: Here
On top of the peg updates were several other quality of life and design changes. Thinner limbs, OGL controllers, updated deformers and other stuff. It’s safe to say this is where some of the biggest change happened this year.
Updates to hand animation accessibility
There was an attempt to do more drawing with the V4 puppets, but the setup I used was too cumbersome and broke easily. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to update this and it was time well spent. Now there is a deeper integration of hand animation processes in all of the rigs. Better still, is the ability to swap to the most frequently used layers that I would like to have more hand animation, via master controller (called “tradswap”). It’s a huge upgrade and I intend to push it even further in the next update.
Updates to the master controllers
While a traditional animation swapping master controller was added, there were other upgrades made. The foreshortening controllers were fixed. Instead of using cut out layers, thy now use curve deformers. There are now cloned controllers for things like blinks (so 1 eye can blink while the other does not). A lip sync controller was also added (which I will discuss more in the next section). Finally, perhaps the biggest changes were the “Controls” and “Clothing” checkboxes. Small changes but mighty in practical use. These new additions allow me to hide controllers easily without interfering with the animation process. The clothing control also allows me to quickly select and access different parts of the puppets to swap clothes more easily. These might be some of my favorite changes to the rigs, and they make animating a lot more fun and seamless.
Updates to the mouths
Finally, one of the more interesting updates was a late addition: the omni-mouth. The V4 puppets were very limited in regard to lip-sync. Almost every instance where I needed to do some lip-sync, the pre-drawn frames came up too limited and rigid. The new omni mouth and controller lets me add some liveliness to lip-syncing. I’m still learning how to make the most of its, but it’s a very welcome addition already.
Updates to the Giggle Gang puppets
This update cycle, I did not give the Giggle Gang too many unique updates. Since the transition to the new IK system was made along with the many other updates, I decided to focus mainly on getting those fixes to these puppets and keeping the design close to their V4 models. There was some slight difficulty getting the limbs to work this year which made upgrading the Giggle Gang a lot more difficult than usual (but God has blessed me with good fortune as I’ve recently found a solution for the limb problem and it’s GREAT).
Updates to Bo went fairly smoothly. Of all of the non KSP puppets, Bo’s updates were the second fastest. There wasn’t any unique features for the puppet so that explains the smooth process. Since Bo is shorter than the KSP, the issues I faced came down to a scaling issue for the limbs but those were taken care of fairly quickly. Lil’ Bo was a bit more unique, and I had to do a small amount of extra work to complete his puppet but everything turned out ok.
Peep was perhaps the most demanding puppet (I’m surrounded by demanding women even in my own art). The reason for this was her size (so I had some of the same limb problems) and her eyes. Just look at those blinkers. So cute. Even though the lashes are simple, I had to make adjustments to her reaction faces and blinks to take them into account. It’s not a problem though, because cute girls need to look the part. I hear she takes at least 2 hours to get her makeup done.
Peep doesn’t like for you to see her without makeup, so she sent me this image instead
Also, what’s that? A beauty mark? It’s nothing to fear. Peep’s skin is flawless but this tiny mole popped up during the updates to let the world know that we are in the presence of a queen.
Here is an evolution of the Giggle Gang Puppets:
Updates to the NPC puppets
An interesting design note is that the NPC puppets are based off of the Bo puppet due to their similar proportions. This means the update process is similar to the Giggle Gang puppets, even though NPC’s don’t show up in that format (they are after all representative of certain types of individuals in the real world). This year I needed to focus on the eyes, and the bulk of that work was done on the KSP, although there are a few unique additions to the NPC’s eyes, or rather, their pupils (do they even have eyes behind that wistful gaze?). The big fix for this year were the blink frames. When animating blinks for NPC’s there was always some glitch of the eye white’s showing. This was due to the eyelid frames being too small to fully mask out the eye whites. A little creepy, but now it’s all fixed along with their blink controllers.
Here is the evolution of the NPC puppets. Ahh, must feel so good to not think!
Updates to the Secondary Character puppets
Unlike the Giggle Gang and NPC puppets, which for all intents and purposes were pretty streamlined (if not time consuming), the secondary character puppets needed a bit more love and attention. The reason being, after completing production of my “Mr. Facebook” short, which has yet to premiere, I encountered so many frustrating bugs with the secondary puppet base. It was truly a nightmare, so I wanted to take some time to refresh it a bit, and make it feature rich. It worked out, but at the cost of some reasonable downgrades.
The biggest fixes were the master controllers. Previous versions of the puppets only had controllers to create characters, but none to animate with. This year that changed, and now the secondary puppets are fitted with most of the master controllers that all of the other puppets come equipped with. Some are missing, but that’s only due to the nature of the puppet, but I may be able to incorporate them at a later time. These puppets also needed some TLC to the torso and pelvis layers due to the higher number of unique body types involved. It was a cumbersome process and I don’t want to do it again for a while.
The downgrades to this puppet came in the variety of assets for the arms and legs. They’re equipped with the standard ones but lost the muscular arms, feminine legs and the clothing options for both. It’s not the biggest loss though, but R.I.P nonetheless.
Here are some pictures representing the evolution of the secondary puppets. Hopefully they can get some more use!
Outro
That’s all for this blog. It turned out to be much longer than I initially expected. It’s a lot of information, but now you know a bit more about how the sausage is made. In addition to that, some good news. I’m already using the puppets to animate some shorts that you will most likely see early next year. So far they have been way more fun to use and have way fewer issues. Even though all of the additions I wanted to have didn’t make it, I think this update was a rounding success. There are more things I will add in the V6 update (spoiler alert, I’m crazy and already working on V6 and made some big fixes), but I will save that for another blog.
Thanks for reading!
-Until next time-