SNEAK PEAK: Ink Demon Animatronic from Bendy! (Also...we learned how to weld!!)

Hey all! We're about a week into our next big project and as usual we've taken on something insanely awesome: the Ink Demon from Bendy and the Ink Machine!

This is another highly requested character that we've been reluctant to build in the past just due to the sheer difficulty of it. The skinny body, the shiny, sculpted inky skin, the huge mouth, all very challenging stuff to make and we just didn't know how to approach it.

After doing DogDay though and discovering that building a steel frame is not just within our grasp but probably easier  than doing this in PVC, we decided to take on the challenge. :)

WE LEARNED HOW TO WELD!

Our first hurdle was the fact that you can't duct tape steel pipes together... 😅 So, we tapped Jaimie's dad for a crash course in welding and it turned out to be way less difficult than expected. Learning to weld has always been intimidating but I'm really glad we finally dove in because it turned out to be WAY LESS difficult than expected. Sure you need some new gear and there's a learning curve but it was really easy to pick up. Also the fact that you can just sort of boop two pieces of metal together and it's stronger than anything else we can do, is CRAZY. It's fast and simple...and CHEAP! The metal is WAY CHEAPER than PVC lol.

We'll discuss this more in the video.

THE STEEL FRAME

Now that we could weld, we started building!

One HUGE benefit of using steel is simply how strong it is, compared to PVC.

As you all know too well, we have had constant issues with weight and things being too heavy so this new way we have now of building strong frames is incredibly cool.

We're trying to match the actual full-size of the character in game, which hunched over should be a bit over 6 ft. We built this frame from 1" square steel and to get the pose right we made a ~1/8 miniature version using thin wire. This way we could play with it to get the shape, balance, angles, etc. Super fun way to experiment and really effective! We were able to use a protractor to capture the angles and transfer them to our steel cuts.

ANIMATING WITH PNEUMATICS!

Like with DogDay, we're going to attempt pneumatics again but this time with a homemade mech! That means adding air cylinders, hoses, etc. and figuring out on our own where all the joints and stuff should go.

We're currently about halfway through adding the animation stuff and so far things seem to be working okay, but the real test will come once we put air through it...we'll see how it goes!

We'll update you again soon on progress as we figure more of this out.

~Jay

P.S. Oh, also we're doing another custom sculpted head for the Ink Demon so that will be available for Patrons as soon as this is done! Hinged jaw and removable horns.