Waldo 1.0 basically came together in a single shot. Design, laser cut, assemble, flap mouth. It only allowed me to move my thumb and wrist, and it wasn’t very good at letting me isolate motion, but functioned basically immediately.
Getting the Waldo to this stage, on the other hand, where I can articulate more than just the thumb, and minimize unwanted secondary motion (aka move my fingers without the whole head jerking around) required a complete rebuild of the gimbal frame just to start. I then had to learn 3D printing and surface modeling in CAD, and do maybe 40 prints producing about a hundred parts. I had to radically re-evaluate the entire approach to the hand control design, including the basic premise that a Waldo hand control should be shaped like the interior of a puppet head.
The Henson approach is undoubtedly superior but much much more difficult to pull off. It basically involves placing all the rotary sensors at the exact axis of rotation for all the digits of the hand. Pulling this off has benefits in terms of one-to-one control, but I discovered that it requires incredibly precise placement or else tons of secondary motion is created.
Frustrated, I thought about trackball mice and game controllers and musical instruments. All of these things let you isolate motion by enabling the hand to move the way it wants to. The sensor doesn’t have to care where your joints are and how they move, you just have to be able to reach them.
I re-designed the hand controls to be shaped more like an ergonomic mouse instead of like a puppet mouth, and although it has created a new learning curve for controlling the character, it’s immediately obvious that this approach is worth pursuing and may very well be the winning form.
Edit: the character model is a wip by an artist named Cramble who is a genius