Create action figure articulation
A step-by-step guide to creating your own articulated action figure toy
As our issue’s cover star, learn from Brodie Perkins the essentials of creating a fully articulated action figure
aloha! In this tutorial I’m going to share a little bit of my general workflow for creating articulation for action figures. Everything we tackle here will be done in Zbrush, although other software such as Maya, Modo and Marvelous Designer are routinely used in toy production as well. This step-bystep guide will hopefully serve as a good general overview of the process and while we won’t delve too deep into the weeds, we’ll definitely cover enough to get you up and running.
As sculpting the character from scratch isn’t necessarily the focus of this tutorial, I’m going to start with my already sculpted moustached weirdo, Mango. Feel free to follow along using the provided base model of Mango, or you can start from a character of your own design!
We’ll pretty much jump right in to working on the articulation. The techniques shown will cover the creation of the basic articulation types used in many of the action figures you see on store shelves, such as ball joints, swivels and hinges. We’ll cover several Zbrush functions such as Morph Targets, Polygroups, Dynamesh and Live Booleans, to name a few.
Once we knock out a few articulation points, you’ll be able to apply and expand upon those techniques to create effectively any type of articulation you want!