Making Skin for Joints
Hi! This is my first real realistic animatronic project. The goal is a costume for a character with super long fingers. I’m trying to make giant puppet hands that’ll be manually controlled via mostly internal strings to match the movement of a person’s hand inside of them. I’ve got what’s essentially a working hollow plastic skeleton, but I have no idea how to give it realistic skin! I’ve done a ton of research, and I can’t seem to find any information for how to give realistic human-like skin to animatronic joints. I need a stretchy material that won’t wrinkle weirdly, and a way to mold it and attach it to the skeleton. Does anyone have any advice on what material and process to use?
Here are some photos of the skeleton of a finger, before I've added the internal string mechanism and proper joints (I used clothespins as a placeholder for joints during construction).
Comments
Latex, or foam latex, are both also commonly used materials for skin properties, which are cheaper and slightly easier to work with, but don't have the same stretching properties as silicone - and being latex, will start to break down before silicone does.
Since the bones in the fingers look quite small, when designing/casting the skin, just make sure they're thick enough around the knuckles that the bones don't start to stick through!