Monday, April 19, 2010

Bender gets emotional - part 2

As mentioned previously, Bender displays emotions via his eyelids, and to a lesser extent via his teeth - specifically the horizontal lines. To that end, I made some extra teeth panels when I first finished the heads, and reserved three of them for "emotional effects" - this page documents finishing two of them.

The teeth panels are simple rectangular panels cut from colourbond offcuts. Colourbond is a common roofing, and fencing steel, about 0.6mm (about 25 thou) thick, and quite "springy"... it'll crack if you attempt to put a sharp bend in it since the way it's shaped hardens it considerably.
This springy-ness is used to hold the panel inside Bender's head - as shown in the photo below.


The two "ears" bent into the teeth panel make it easier to spring the teeth panel into a tight curve to insert and position the panel.

Knowing how difficult it'd be to mask up some nice curves, I acquired some of the adhesive tape used for putting gridlines on whiteboards and tried using that to make some wavy lines (Bender's "error" teeth pattern) - it worked OK.

A second line added..



I also tried some sharper wavy lines to recreate Bender's look when shocked - that didn't work as well since the tape couldn't turn sharp corners without puckering. I ended up pulling it off and creating the shocked lines with black paint free handed on to the panel.


Here is the finished panel installed in the spare head - "error"

And the "shocked" look...
Next installment should make Bender happy - he gets his cigar, and a beard he "never wears".

No comments:

Post a Comment