Music in this video: • Baby's Capture Mechani...
Baby is one of my favorite characters in Five Nights at Freddy’s: she stands out for being one of the only times an animatronic has been a genuine character in and of themselves, beyond just ‘monster with a sympathetic backstory’. Amoral but not evil, manipulative and yet naively childish. She’s more fleshed-out than a lot of the human cast, ironically enough.
This is an iteration on my previous concept for an alternate Lefty design I made a tad over two years ago at time of writing. The concept is more or less the same, but I’ve learned many new tricks since then. This has meant breaking some new ground for me on the mechanical engineering side of things (my favorite part): my first use of U-joints, rubber drive belts, springs, gears, a scissor lift mechanism, a new more detailed eye mechanism driven by servos, and new efforts made to include at least a vague representation of air/fluid canisters for the pistons, wherever possible. It’s still not perfect, there are a few aspects that are glossed over or missing, but it’s my most mechanically sound animatronic design to date. As always, no cheating- all instances of clipping and impossible joints from the official design have been fixed.
The outer plastic shell is pretty much unchanged from the games, based on the official model from Help Wanted, replaced bit by bit until none of the original model is left. All the interior skeleton is completely new, but I tried to keep the general look of ‘Ennard wires emulating musculature’ that all the SL endoskeletons have. My idea with this is that the writhing tubes contract and twist to move the skeleton, in a similar way to real muscles over bone.
Where normally I animate FNaF animatronics to emphasize their ‘unalive-ness’, for want of a better word, here I changed my approach to be more expressive and natural. It’s my attempt at giving a nod to Baby being unusually self-aware.
I felt the need to take a different approach to the sound design as well. I recorded a new set of movement sounds, with the intent of sounding a bit less clanky and primitive, more smooth and sleek. Sister Location has a very futuristic aesthetic, so my normal library of sound effects just didn’t seem to fit.
Sounds are recorded from a 3D Printer, a wind-up toy for the eye servos, a refrigerator for miscellaneous mechanical hums, a variety of doorknobs and push-bars for the new clunky sounds, and sound effects carried over from FNaF proper, namely Sister Location and Security Breach. The sound for the inflating balloon comes from this incredibly convenient KZfaq channel: / @soundeffects24
Additional textures from poliigon.com
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