Make a Bobblehead Character

In previous posts I showed a generic walking character rendered from Poser named Ryan. He is fine for getting somewhere quickly with a proof-of-concept without getting lost in the weeds of what is possible with Poser.

How To Bobble

To take that work a step further while continuing to avoid that deep dive into modeling and clothing figures, I present a labor-cheap alternative that I call a Bobble-head. I doubt this is original, I think I might have seen Terry Gilliam do something like this at some point.

I had a friend take a snapshot of me from 5 angles that I need to show my ffilmation character from an angle roughly matching that of the game. To get the angle I sat down on the floor. Flat lighting is essential to avoid weird shadows or color effects. You will save a lot of time on silhouetting backgrounds if you can find a solid color background or hang a blanket behind the subject. An office conference room is a good place.

I transformed the silhouetted head shapes so that it looked like each one fit on Ryan’s body at a given angle. To do this I put each angle of Ryan standing in a layer in Fireworks. Then I imported the head bitmaps into a copy of the .fla file containing Ryan, which I had already finished and tested.

A quick test using the script in this post on the .fla showed that I had some more work to do to make the head look natural. It just floated around like a stationary object pasted on Ryan.

How Not To Bobble
[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”10.0.0″ useexpressinstall=”true” movie=”./wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bobbleHeadTest1.swf” width=”400″ height=”400″ targetclass=”flashmovie” align=”none” play=”true” loop=”true” menu=”false” quality=”best” scale=”showall”]Get Adobe Flash player

[/kml_flashembed]
Sorry, Was I Bobbling?

Some tweening and testing for each angle made a convincing connection between the two images while maintaining a certain amount of artificiality to the whole thing. Most of the tweens in the mirror angles of the character could be reused by pasting them in and flipping them horizontally. Plan on spending some time on this part, although not as much as you might if you have a learning curve to climb with Poser.

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”10.0.0″ useexpressinstall=”true” movie=”./wp-content/uploads/2010/05/FFCharacters_mac.swf” width=”400″ height=”400″ targetclass=”flashmovie” align=”none” play=”true” loop=”true” menu=”false” quality=”best” scale=”showall”]Get Adobe Flash player

[/kml_flashembed]

Final Build

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