A 2025 R&D case study details Aardman's VR 'Puppet Sculpt' tool for reviewing digital puppet designs

A 2025 case study in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, by researcher Tom Livingstone (University of the West of England) working inside Aardman Animations under the UKRI-funded MyWorld R&D programme, documents Puppet Sculpt: an experimental tool built to shorten Aardman's puppet-department review loop. The studio's puppet designers already sculpt characters digitally in ZBrush, but signing off a design has traditionally meant 3D-printing a physical proof for the director and production designer to inspect and mark up -- a costly, slow cycle when a note sends the design back for another pass. Puppet Sculpt tests whether a virtual review environment can replace that print step. The team first tried iPad-based AR, then a VR headset; VR won out because it gave reviewers better spatial context than viewing a design on a flat screen held up to the real world. An early attempt at game-style VR motion controllers proved distracting, so the team built physical proxies -- handheld controllers and a gyroscope-fitted stand-in figure -- that let a reviewer handle the virtual puppet the way they would a physical one. The navigation scheme they settled on borrows directly from ZBrush's own convention: rather than moving physically closer to inspect detail, the reviewer zooms in, the same input logic a ZBrush artist already uses at the sculpting stage. Dan Efergan, Eve Bolotova (3D Scanning and Virtual Production Lead) and David Gray are named as Aardman's side of the collaboration, and the paper situates the work against the studio's recent slate, including Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

For the database, the durable fact is the pipeline problem and the tool built to solve it -- a virtual, ZBrush-informed review step aimed at a real production bottleneck (needless 3D-print iterations) -- rather than any single press cycle around the paper. Folded into the Wiki as zbrush-digital-puppet-sculpting alongside LAIKA's older, better-documented use of ZBrush as the digital source file for its own 3D-printed replacement-face pipeline, so the two studios' different uses of the same tool sit on one page.