Sylvie 2021 - Complete Animatronic Skull

Last crawled date: 4 years, 2 months ago

Note: Due to a bug in Thingiverse, previews are not available. But files are ready to download!
Complete animatronic skull set for Sylvie 2021 - An open source 3d printable Girlfriend. Uses 14 sg90 servos: 8 for eyes (check my other designs), 2 for eyebrows, 3 for mouth and 1 for jaw.
Very gruelling amount of labour. I don't envy anyone in this line of work.. I really don't!
The battle between Virtual Reality girlfriends and Android girlfriends is similar to the battle between CGI and Practical Effects. I suppose you could say I'm a fan of practical effects.
The goal of Sylvie 2021 is to achieve animatronics that not only 'feel' right, but also look right when the silicone skin is applied. And getting things to look right is 95% of the work, most of which involves careful measurements, tweaks and a lot of the times... starting everything from scratch and spending another 1-2 months on your project (which is the most disheartening aspect of it).
Major problems in animatronics, even on the professional-level, are:
Gaps between the eyeballs and the eyelids.
Uncanny valley
'Dead'-looking eyes
Jittery motion
The 'spooky' look (usually caused by having the eyes too wide open at the wrong time, or badly designed irises)
And much more
Animatronic Eyes come in a separate listing:https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4092875

This set includes eyebrow and mouth mechanism.


Since there is no space to integrate a servo for the jawline (without bumping into the neck bearing or the other servos inside the mouth).. I have placed a microservo at the top of the head (although I might replace it with an HX5010 to get more torque and wider jaw movement range).


I'm in the process of designing the back cover, which will have an Nvidia Jetson Nano single board computer inside of it.

Nvidia Jetson Nano will be the brains of the whole robot, basically.. communicating with arduino minis all over the body using i2c.
- Includes silicone skin mould and core. Look up Brick in the Yard Mould Supply for quality silicone casting videos. Head must be sanded prior to moulding.. you will likely have to print two pieces and join them together. I recommend using ABS. Only use SilPoxy to glue skin to animatronic rigs. Use cloth + glue gun to coat the surface of your articulation points as SilPoxy will not stick to any 3d printed plastic.
Use EcoFlex 00-10 or PlatSil Gel 0020 for silicone skin casting. I recommend using brush-on-mold.
3d model was made using a 3d scan of my own face, which was then slightly modified to more closely resemble Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
This thing is listed as a Work in Progress because I physically modified many of the parts while printing them (drilling, filing, etc).. and many of the original models will need to be redone.
Have fun.. stay curious!
Demo:https://youtu.be/L5RHRJ9YPdshttps://youtu.be/QMI8xNjj8UM