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Fursuit Partial Video

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S. Heslop:


Yikes thats a hell of a thumbnail.


Haven't posted much lately since i've been up to some strange stuff, this mask being one of those things.

It's not the first mask I made. I made this one in the run-up to a convention and ended up not wearing it because... well... it's a little scary.



There's two big schools of thought in the fursuit world, the 'toony' and the realistic. As a modest guy (or I was more modest back then!) I went for the realistic sort. They can look great in photos, if a little corny. But in motion they're a bit static. Kinda reminds me of taxidermy. My attempt sure does!

So the idea was to try offset that with some light animatronics. Not much room to fit servos but I figured anything would help. The idea was to control them with a 4 buttons embedded in a glove. I figure if you practised you could hit combinations of the buttons as you talk to match basic phonemes.

The animatronics didn't work out so great. The small servos burned out fairly quickly, and the stouter ones I bought and installed on route to the convention overloaded the power supply. For the 10 seconds it did work a friend said something like 'the mask looks hideous but when it was moving, it actually looked pretty good'.

Kinda wish I left it like this. It's the kinda thing a modern movie bankrobber might wear to really freak out the tellers.


After making that first mask I slapped another together as an excersise in how quickly (and cheaply!) I could make one if I cut corners. As of right now its kinda falling apart. Mostly due to the hot glue not wanting to hold to the urethane. Normal epoxy doesn't do much better, so I think rivets or maybe a specialist epoxy are the way to go if you're using urethane.




Anyways the hope was that i'd sang a sale so I could put the money towards a 3d printer. They charge over £1000 or some crap for the big ones, which are mostly just constructed from those standard aluminium extrusions. So I was planning to build my own. Tried alot of ideas in sketchup and was starting to settle on this.



It's somewhat overbuilt to begin with, but I couldn't find any source for thin walled 100x50 ERW tube and picked up some 3mm thick hot rolled instead. I was starting to cut holes in the stuff to try lighten it - I wouldn't be able to lift the machine by myself if I left them bare. Before realising that it was... kinda stupid. So right now i'm looking at those delta designs since they seem much easier to construct and fairly efficient with materials. But as always it's money thats delaying it, as well as a secret side project.

I've never been big on 3d printers. I think it's mostly since they were introduced as a hobby device (right after the FDM patents expired) along with a bunch of bizarre saving the world style hot air. 'Imagine if African babies could Empowered to manufacture their own lumpy parts - using complicated CNC machines and hard to source plastic fiber'. That kind of nonsense still exists around the machines, don't get me started on that manufactured media farce about the 3d printed gun, but i've had to begrudgingly admit that the're probably the best solution to the problem of each mask being a different shape to match character and the wearer's head. It'd also help with being able to work backwards from the target look instead of having to make alot of leaps of faith and hoping for the best while building it.

But what I really want to get back into is the animatronics idea. I've got alot of thoughts on that whole angle.

vtsteam:
WOW!  :jaw:

millwright:
As they used to say on Monty Python "And now for something completely different" and it certainly was, Really enjoyed that very informative,  interesting, a great looking mask, and a well put together video  :clap: :clap: :clap:

john

tom osselton:
Here in Calgary there was a kids oriented mostly pizza place that had a animated Hillbilly Bear band that was a great success along with arcade games for the b-day crowd but it was bought out by Chucky Cheez and was shut down a sad day for a lot of people!
I just remembered it’s name Bullwinkles!

S. Heslop:

--- Quote from: tom osselton on July 10, 2018, 03:35:59 PM ---Here in Calgary there was a kids oriented mostly pizza place that had a animated Hillbilly Bear band that was a great success along with arcade games for the b-day crowd but it was bought out by Chucky Cheez and was shut down a sad day for a lot of people!
I just remembered it’s name Bullwinkles!

--- End quote ---

I've heard about those places. I don't know if they ever made it to the UK, not where I live at least. One of my earlier memories was being terrified by a guy in a Charlie Chalk costume and throwing balls in his direction from the restraunt's ball pit. Explains why I didn't get invited to many birthday parties. But I can only imagine how much more a bunch of robots would've spooked me.

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