Style Updates 9 - Stronger, Better, Faster
Overview
After completing the stylesheet, I jumped right into the next thing: fixing the main puppet. I’ve been itching to make these changes since February of this year (2025), so when I finally got the chance to get started I was working out issues like a mad man.
There are several longstanding issues I focused on to fix the puppet:
Updating the aesthetics of the character (which I previously discussed in another blog here)
Fixing the hands so they are properly masked and have overlapping lines when neccessary
Adding the ability for the eyes and the mouth to pop out and overlap the puppet’s head
Fixing the legs so they are masked properly by the torso and pelvis
Organizing and renaming the nodes properly
Plus A LOT more
When I started working on this, I had expected the process to go by much slower. Usually puppet updates themselves take a few months before they’re complete; however, this time things have been moving at a brisk and efficient pace. In part this may be due to the naming and re-organizing. It’s easy to fix things when you know what they are.
Who knew?!
The list above seems pretty small and negligible, but in actuality they were strong limiters for what I could get done with the puppets. They limited what should have been simple and easy to make animations. They were constantly glitching. They even made a lot of the dynamic posing I had expected to do, practically impossible as once the puppet moved into position, they would get masked improperly, or break during animation. They also slowed down the animation process by a lot. A good example is the “Master Controller’s” (which I might talk about more in depth in a future blog). Sometimes they ended up moving during an animation, or certain values would be adjusted in the puppet that shouldn’t have been part of the controller and a bunch of other stuff. It was just frustrating to deal with and made an already cumbersome process more annoying. On top of that these issues prohibited me from building a larger animation library because I was aware of the issues and knew if they weren’t fixed, I’d have to re-animate the library, giving me even more work to do.
The major goal of this change was to knock out as many issues, and implement some future proofing to the puppet where possible. The optimizations I planned for were introduced so that future updates will be much smaller, and allow me to focus more time on animating shorts instead of fixing issues. I think a large reason why I’ve felt burned out the past year or so with the shorts is because it was frustrating to get the quality of animation I wanted, and the shorts weren’t up to the standard I wanted them to be. This was in part because I had to make time for fixing issues that should have been sorted out a long time ago.
Outro
Overall things are going very well for the puppet updates. It hasn’t been a perfect process, but the amount of changes I’ve been able to implement, and issues I can fix, this puppet could be considered a completely new standard for what I’ve had to work with. Ultimately as long as the effort I’m making leads to higher quality shorts that are easier to produce, that will make this a win for me. At the time of this writing I’m somewhere around 70%-80% done with the updates for the main puppet (there are 5 other puppets to update, but they all use this one’s assets), and I’m feeling very confident and excited about it.
But that’s a subject for another day.
-Until next time-