Style Updates 11 - Finishing Touches

Overview

As I’m currently writing this blog, the ‘master puppet’ or “KSP” (Kyle Samuels Puppet) has been completed.

Cue audience applause.

Not only that, I have recently completed the ‘Bo’ puppet and am about halfway done finishing the ‘Lil’ Bo’ puppet from my giggle gang shorts. Things have been moving along fairly briskly, though not fast enough for my liking. This is most likely due to the finishing process of the puppets.

Roundup

When it comes to these updates, the most difficult part for me tends to be the bug testing and finishing phase. No matter how well I think I’ve done with planning an update, something *always* shows up or breaks the puppets in a way that, if not caught early will make production ab absolute nightmare. This process has repeated itself for years, so in order to break the cycle I have decided to list out a finishing process that allows me to test the puppets for issues before they’re deployed.

Here is what that process looks like:

• Optimization and consolidation phase

• I find ways to condense the puppet to its most necessary components and find ways to make it run better. This usually means making focusing on where to simplify processes or change the types of composition nodes.

• Bug testing

• While in the puppet file I scrub through the timeline to find glitches and breaks. Glitches come in the form of pop-in of assets where they don’t belong, strange timing of the motion keyframes, controllers bot working and so on. I also dedicate a keyframe for moving the puppet around and purposefully breaking it to see what potential issues I will come across during production.

• Timeline clean up

• This is a continuation of the last phase, but the purpose of it is to streamline and notate the timeline for ease of access. The rig files are a little under 1000 frames, and I want to keep it organized across all the puppets so updates don’t take longer than necessary.

• Master controller testing

• This phase is for remedying any glitches and bugs I find in the master controllers. Sometimes poses don’t animate well, or random keyframes carry over that change the positions of the controllers themselves. Both of those things and more get sorted in this phase, and it’s where I’ve had the most headaches with previous updates.

• Polish

  • This phase is for final touches and spontaneous smaller ideas, and removing any non-performative redundancies. Things like layer selectors or master controller illustrations would go here.

• Exporting and importing tests

• The moment of truth for functionality. You’d think this would be the easiest phase, but the puppet gets broken a lot at this point for whatever reason. This phase includes trimming the scene, deleting master controller animations (because they are saved in the controllers and main file) and removing additional assets like palettes. After this the template is imported into a new file to check for breakage and potential master controller issues.

• Lighting tests

• Not every puppet goes through this, just the “KSP”. This test is to see if the puppet works with my lighting rigs, and if not, I try to adjust either the lighting rig or puppet until things look the way that they should.

• Pose library

• Finally I work on base animation assets for each of the puppets that allows me to build a library for quick access during short production. The puppets get: Sit, stand, walk and run poses and animations that allow me to set up or animate scenes quickly. The poses also serve as a good base for future iteration.

The puppets all mostly go through the same process (save for certain situations). This doesn’t fully rid the puppets of any bugs, but it does make animating a lot better. Recently, to offset any headaches, I’ve started to keep a ‘bug list’ of known issues that the puppets have, so future updates can be spent ironing those problems out instead of letting them fester.

This update is also structured a little differently because I will be deploying the puppets as they get completed, as opposed to waiting until they are all finished to utilize them. The upgrades for the V5 puppets are so much better than what I had previously that I want to get used to working with them ASAP as they will function as the new standard for my shorts.

Outro

While 2 puppets are complete and a 3rd is almost finished, I still have more work to do. In total there are 5 puppet templates that get updated every cycle and they all come with their own issues. Fortunately the upgrade process becomes a bit easier and quicker after the completion of each subsequent puppet. Things are looking good and I’m track to be completely done by these updates EOY or Q1 2026.

-Until next time-