Sluggo the Virtual Puppet: Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

Winter 2025 Review: Sluggo the Virtual Puppet

Sluggo in the digital realm

This is a continuing journal of my project to design and build "Sluggo," a physical hand puppet that I digitized, rigged, and developed with hand gesture controls in Unity.

Digitizing Sluggo

The first step in this multimedia project was to design and produce a physical hand puppet, affectionately named "Sluggo."

Step 1: Scanning

The scanning process

The physical puppet was set on a table atop a water bottle to hold it motionless during the scanning process. A hand scanner was used to digitize the puppet from every angle.

Sluggo the point cloud

The scanning process produced a cloud of colored points. The scan did a good job of capturing the details of the folds in the felt, the points where the pieces were sewn together, and the general color of the puppet. The point cloud needed to be converted to a triangular mesh with a material before further work could be performed.

Sluggo in Maya with 122K+ triangles

The 3D model is highly detailed with more than 122,000 triangles. I felt that performance would be improved in my planned real-time environment if I didn't have such a high-poly mesh to work with. Additionally, I could work more easily to edit the mesh if it was retopologized and quadrangulated (I can triangulate it for use in Unity later). I attempted to reduce the polygon count in Maya, but the command would either fail or produce an unsatisfactory result. 

Step 2: Correcting Errors in the Model with Meshmixer

Sluggo in Meshmixer

Autodesk Meshmixer is a relatively easy-to-use tool designed for use with 3D printing, but it can be repurposed for many types of 3D models. I sculpted the mesh to remove the few errors and aberrations from the scanning process, mostly around the base of the puppet (the end of the "sleeve") and to build up structure that was lost on the eyeballs. Unfortunately, this added a lot of polygonal detail in the areas where I was sculpting, mostly notably in the eyeballs.

Step 3: Retopologizing in Instant Meshes

Sluggo getting a new topology in Instant Meshes

Instant Meshes is a tool used for creating Instant Field-Aligned Meshes, based on a paper published by ACM. This tool helps create a topology that aligns well with the shape of a mesh, with the user able to paint direction lined directly ono the mesh, "combing" the lines of topology in specific directions. This quadrangulated the mesh and reduced to the polygon count, but unfortunately, it also destroyed the work I had done to fix the eyeballs. The ends of Sluggo's eyestalks became thin and pointy.

Step 4: Clean up in Mudbox

Sluggo in MudBox

Autodesk Mudbox is a sculpting tool that allowed me to "puff up" Sluggo's eyeballs and give them back the structure lost in the previous step of the process. I then corrected any errors in the texture material by using the stamp tool directly on the model, which works a lot like the stamp tool in Photoshop. I also flattened out the half circles that comprise Sluggo's mouth and refined other parts of the model.

Step 5: Back to Maya

Sluggo in Maya down to 77K+ triangles

The mesh now has a quad topology and is reduced to 77,000+ triangles. That is still a higher polygon count than I think I'll need, but I know that I want extra detail in the mesh so that it can nicely deform as it animates.

Next Step: Riggging