Animatronics Software

Continue reading “Animatronic Puppet Takes Cues From Animation Software” → Posted in Arduino Hacks Tagged animation, animatronics, arduino, lip sync, stop motion R.O.B. Gets A Proper RC.

Is used to choreograph the servo movements with the sound. First thing is VSA configuration. The Tools/Settings menu brings up a dialog box listing the configurations for all tracks. Change the type to 'Parallax Servo' & set the port number.

Change the address to match the channel that the servo is plugged into on the Parallax board. You can give a descriptive label to the track, like Eyes, Jaw, etc. Check the baud rate under Port Settings & make sure it's 38400 for the Parallax board. The +Value, -Value, & Default set the limits of the servo, and the default starting postition. VSA has a useful tool called 'WaveMotion Analysis' that can automatically generate events from the volume of an audio file (This is why we saved each voice in it's own wav file).

Load each voice track & generate control events for the appropriate servo. Afterwards, load the combined audio track.

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Greetings from! You have a very cool display. I'm so glad we could help inspire you. As you know, we're just some parents trying to make a difference in our schools, and we think animatronics is a great alternative to the traditional robotics programs. So now that you know how easy this was to do, go tell your local schools that they should look into it. paul P.S.

One extra tip: you can make the mouth movements look even better by playing with the dialog tracks. The problem is that lower volume areas hardly cause any motion. Just normalize these up in Audacity before running WaveMotion Analysis. Remember to keep an unaltered version for your combined track that you actually listen to.

Lip syncing for computer animated characters has long been simplified. You draw a set of lip shapes for vowels and other sounds your character makes and let the computer interpolate how to go from one shape to the next. But with physical, real world puppets, all those movements have to be done manually, frame-by-frame. Or do they?

Stop motion animator and maker/hacker [James Wilkinson] is working on a project involving a real-world furry cat character called Billy Whiskers and decided that Billy’s lips would be moved one frame at a time using servo motors under computer control while [James] moves the rest of the body manually.

He toyed around with a number of approaches for making the lip mechanism before coming up with one that worked the way he wanted. The lips are shaped using guitar wire soldered to other wires going to servos further back in the head. Altogether there are four servos for the lips and one more for the jaw. There isn’t much sideways movement but it does enough and lets the brain fill in the rest.

On the software side, he borrows heavily from the tools used for lip syncing computer-drawn characters. He created virtual versions of the five servo motors in Adobe Animate and manipulates them to define the different lip shapes. Animate then does the interpolation between the different shapes, producing the servo positions needed for each frame. He uses an AS3 script to send those positions off to an Arduino. An Arduino sketch then uses the Firmata library to receive the positions and move the servos. The result is entirely convincing as you can see in the trailer below. We’ve also included a video which summarizes the iterations he went through to get to the finished Billy Whiskers or just check out his detailed website.

[Jame’s] work shows that there many ways to do stop motion animation, perhaps a part of what makes it so much fun. One of those ways is to 3D print a separate object for each character shape. Another is to make paper cutouts and move them around, which is what [Terry Gilliam] did for the Monty Python movies. And then there’s what many of us did when we first got our hands on a camera, move random objects around on our parent’s kitchen table and shoot them one frame at a time.