Intro

I spent most of 2025 reworking my entire animation pipeline because making shorts was not as fun as I wanted it to be. It was a lot of work and the update was completed around October 2025. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to accomplish everything I wanted to because of time constraints. The scale of the project kept getting bigger and I had to decide that it was time to end it so I could move on. Once finished, I did a few experiments and tests with the puppets to check for issues and to see how they animated. Once those were done and the results were in I found the performance of the V5 puppets lacking, to be frank.

While they looked mostly good, they didn’t animate well. As an example, the implementation of FK for the puppets limbs were not working properly. I planned to fix the V5 bugs for the V6 updates. I figured that I could survive with the V5 puppets for now because they were still a decently sized upgrade from the V4 puppets.

It’s How You Move That Matters

Once the puppets were complete, I rested for a little while. In that time I decided to do some research on how I could fix the bugs that were popping up.

This is why work is never finished by the way.

I was able to find solutions for almost all of the bugs and glitches I had with the V5 puppets. Excited by this, I went to my update log and decided I could probably do a ‘special operation’ for the V6 rigs. I made it a goal to have them done before the end of 2025 (and I actually got them done ahead of schedule). The scope of the update was simple: it would be exclusively a rigging and master controller update. I did not want to make new assets, change overhaul the style or do anything too extraneous. Some aesthetic changes were made, such as a smaller torso for the human puppets, but it was done sparingly.

The bulk of changes would directed at the pegs and other deformation nodes. Additional controllers were also made to streamline the animation process, especially in the case of the secondary puppets. Speaking of the secondary puppets, huge changes were made to them so I could create and animate secondary characters more easily. Animation with the secondary puppets were a complete nightmare, and was one of the reasons why I stopped working on long form shorts. The V4 version of the puppets (the last version I was able to use extensively) were so bug-ridden and unreliable, that I hated them.

The secondary puppets now have a bunch of extra controllers for customization, and many of the main controllers that the KSP has. It’s awesome, and so far there is very little functional difference between using a character I just modeled on the spot, and the KSP.

With all that said, let’s take a look behind the scenes. Here’s a peak at some of the stuff on the change log.

Cleanup

KSP blink controller missing squint
Mirror mole for peep face
Fix female pelvis position for secondary character
Fix neck group once two point constraint added to neck
Fix lower arm clothing not showing
Push torso and pelvis controllers all to the front for easier selection
Lower lip shows up during eye pop

Design

Shorten torso / adjust arm and leg position for KSP
Round head more / get rid of the cal arts cheek?
Round out pelvis for KSP and secondary character puppet

Controllers

Body transparency controller (on/off)
Torso rotation controller
Leg rotation controller
Remove curve controllers and add controllers for each limb (include trad layers)
Hand drop controller

R&D

Lil bo, peep shoulder and elbow not rounded when using IK
Forearm has limited rotation when using IK
Look into constraint switch for IK/FK switch master controller
Experiment with a method to resize the limbs that does not include being linked to the body
Develop way to scale puppet without breaking limbs

Demonstration (Gif overload)

As far as the Giggle Gang and NPC puppets are concerned, they have all of the FK/IK updates. They themselves had very little in the way of changes, so it would just be repetitive to show them here as they look the same as the V5 versions.

With that said, let’s see what the V6 puppets can do. I’ll show them from the POV of the KSP, for the riggings fixes, and the secondary puppet, for the new master controllers.

Here is the V5 version of the KSP, along with his and the secondary puppet’s V6 version

Here are the controllers for the V5 (left) and V6 (right). The V6 has a lot more controllers, but it makes animation so much easier.

Here are some of the V6 controllers in action. The arm and leg controllers have a curve deformer setting that is hard to see without their visibility turned on.

The V5 (left) puppets would not scale normally. I was able to fix it for the V6 (right).

FK / IK

The FK and IK for the V5 (left) puppets were not functioning as predictably as I had hoped. This was the major fix I needed to make for the V6 (right) puppets. I’m happy to say that they work so much better now. FK for the V5 puppets were practically useless. The pegs needed to be selected in the node view in order to do so. In the V6 puppets, the FK is fixed, and selecting them is even easier with the addition of a doughnut OGL selection controller. This makes my zone of focus for animation almost exclusively isolated to the camera view, which is a big quality of life change for me. I also added IK to the neck. This wasn’t really a necessity, but more for future proofing the puppets so updates down the line would not need to focus too much on rigging.

The Secondary Puppet

As mentioned before, the secondary puppet now has almost all of the controllers of the KSP (turns, lipsync, arm and leg controllers, etc.), plus some more ‘character creation’ controllers. This means animating with these puppets are almost the exact same as animating with a specially designed one. It’s a massive quality of life upgrade that I wish I had made sooner.

Speaking of creating characters… have I mentioned how fun and easy it is to make them now? I could spend hours messing around with these controllers to make unique characters. There are also a few things I wasn’t able to show (different nose types and eye types), which make the characters even more unique.

Outro

This updates was definitely unexpected, but I’m really happy I committed to it, instead of postponing it to 2026. These are some really nice changes and as of writing this blog, the puppets already been deployed in shorts. There’s also a chance you, the reader might have actually seen a short with them in it already!

That’s all for now.

-Until next time-

The V6 Puppets