- If I wanna make an animatronic puma
and I want it to be realistic,
the first thing I'm gonna do is, cheat a little bit.
I'm gonna go to taxidermy sources who have
all sorts of materials that I can use as reference.
For instance, this here, is a
form that you can buy from a taxidermy company
and you know it's gonna be accurate
because you've seen beautiful taxidermy done.
The difference between taxidermy animals
and what we do is, we make them move
and make them move realistically.
But this serves as a very important accurate
reference for what we're gonna create.
Alright, we don't use that as a sculpture,
it's just, there's a reference.
Another thing that you can get is, taxidermy inner teeth.
Anyway, we use that as a reference as well
and we'll actually incorporate these plastic teeth
into our arm model, of course,
these are little simple in their execution and their paint
and when we finish up, we usually
do a much nicer paint job on.
Another reference that we'll use is an actual puma skull.
Not an actual puma skull, a replica of a puma skull
that you can get from bone clones
or a company like that, so it says, cougar right there.
Cougar, puma, catamount, mountain lion,
those are all different words for the same animal.
When we sculpted this guy, we used
an actual replica skull inside
to be sure that we had everything
accurate and anatomically correct.
We then created a sculpture and
again, we use this as a reference
but we also made it a little bit more anthropomorphic.
Just tiny hints, subtle things to
make it a little more human like
because we're gonna add human like expressions to it.
There's nothing scientific about,
it's all in the art of it and as you
work on the sculpture, you get it to the point where you go,
"how's that gonna move when it moves.
A little more on the brows, give it a little more brow."
that kind of thing, but don't
take it too much towards human.
It depends on how caricature and how accurate you want.
So anyway, we make a clay sculpture and
I got the foam latex piece already.
Alright, that sculpture exists no longer
because we made a mold of it, but this is what
the sculpture looked like when it was in clay.
But to get from the sculpture to foam latex,
we had to make a mold, we had to make a mold out of
UltraCal because it needs to be something that goes
into the oven and baked, to get the foam latex.
So here's our UltraCal mold of the puma head
and it's a three part mold.
So you open that up and there's the inside of the mold.
From this mold, we produced the foam latex skin.
But in order to do that and get an accurate skin thickness,
we've gotta have a core, a baking core.
So, once we make the mold,
we actually lay in a thickness of clay
that determines how thick we want
our skin to be in every place.
In some places it's thinner, some places it's thicker
and that produces a core, that's the core.
That's like the underskull, that's the
skeleton part, the skeletal element
and those are the hard parts and that's what's
gonna support our foam latex skin.
Then we have to make a mold of the core
and that's what this is, this is our core mold.
You see how complicated this is getting?
From this core mold, that's a mold of our core,
we can produce a laid up fiber glass core or a polyfoam core
and what's nice is, you can use a polyfoam core
to put your skin on and from the mold of the core,
also, you can produce a vacuform buck
and we're gonna show you how we're going to
vacuform over this buck to get a
transparent underskull, so you can see what's going on.
A lot of times, you'll run a fiberglass one
and that's good to do and it's very accurate
or you can run a carbon fiber one,
but those are more opaque and for
the purposes of this lesson, I wanna show you
what's going on with a transparent underskull.
And so we'll be vacuforming on a buck,
that's what we call it, of this
and then I have to vacuform the front and the back
and then, put them together to give my underskull.