Six months later after extensive use, the tablet has really been a useful sketchbook tool. I take it with me almost everywhere I go. I can go to lunch and paint the waitress, or just sit on a park bench and paint the trees on a nice sunny day. No need to worry about mixing paints, or making a mess on my work clothes. Worse case scenario is that it squawks at me saying it is low on batteries.

Of course you have to worry about the battery life, but having a low power tablet has the great benefit enabling long drawing sessions. I have drawn for six or seven hours in a sitting and didn’t have to worry about charging it. I really think that having a huge battery life is probably one of the most important things with a “mobile sketchbook”.  The freedom it gives you makes it feel more like a tool than another accessory.

A few points when sketching with a tablet

• Don’t fiddle around too much with settings. It can be tempting, but it really gets distracting and makes it hard to be relaxed.
• Pick a couple of brushes and a few colors, and stick with them.  Again, all of the options are distracting.
• Don’t abuse the undo button. Just paint over your mistakes. It is more natural and ends up creating more character in the piece.
• Drawing on glass is different feeling, so concentrate on what you see an not how your hand feels. You get use to it.

Here are some of the sketches I have done with it. They are in a random order, so the quality of the sketch is probably closely related to how long I have had it. I go to a lot of figure drawing meetup groups, so that is where all of the naked ladies are coming from. Let me know if anyone else has started using tablets for sketching. I would love to hear your experience!

Here is a setup that I am currently using for idle/walk/run/turn.

Yes, that is right. You can do them all with one blend tree.

It is amazing that you can have a single blend state to manage everything. Just create a new blend tree like normal. The idle animation has a blue connection in the image above — indicating that it is the current animation that is playing. It is cool to see it changing dynamically as you test the game. Below is how to set up an 2D Directional blend tree.

There are different types of Blend trees, but the one that works great for a joystick is the 2D Freeform directional. By the image above, you can see how I have most of it set up. The two parameters at the top are the horizonatl and vertical input. Those are just mapped by grabbing the Input.GetAxis(“Horizonta”) and Input.GetAxis(“Vertical”) and setting them to an animator parameter.  the Pos X and Pos Y are the threshold when the animations start. Unity recommends having an idle animation when both axis are zero. I do this in my blend tree as you can see.

You can see that idle happens at 0, walk will be at full force at 0.3, and run will start at 0.7.  Values are normalized between -1 to 1. The animations interpolate very smoothly between the different animations.

There are two “Turn Right” animations. The second one has a check mark at the end. This denotes that it is a mirrored animation. It is really only necessary for animations that are done predominantly on one side of the body. If you have a right hand punch, you also have a left hand punch now by just clicking a check mark.

Finally, the last parameter is the animation speed that is associated. Mine are all just set to 1.

If you look at the blue nodes in the graph above the motion grid, you will notice a blue airbrush effect around the selected animation ( walk in this case). This is the area of influence of the animation and how the blending weights will transition for it. Pretty cool.

These complex blend trees allows for some really sophisticated movement without having to worry about managing a ton of different states. All with almost no code. Yes!!

This is just one blend tree, but you can easily create multiple blend trees depending on different parameters. My game for example, has a “isFlying” bool that will determine if the flying movement happens or the ground movement happens. It is easy to maintain when you just have to connect two blend trees together instead of having to manage a spiderweb of animation states. I love Mecanim!!!

Concept Art

All this Unity stuff is my feeble attempt to get back into game development after a little break. I have been working on some concept art recently to help motivate me to learn more about game development.

Story:  A young  girl is sent to an insane asylum after seeing her family brutally murdered. After having numerous fits of rage and nervous breakdowns, she is diagnosed as legally insane and condemned to a life in solitude.  Until…

I have a lot more of the story fleshed out in my mind. The basic idea for the game is that you are a pissed off girl trying to destroy the world. Get ready for lots of explosions and blowing stuff up!

I  started building out the 3d  city and getting some basic game play mechanics roughed out. I thought it would be cool to have the setting at sunset — kind of foreshadowing that the “end is near”. I was originally thinking to have my target platform be on iOS or an Android tablet, but the controls are quickly getting too complex to support it. I will probably have to opt for desktop or an Ouya.

It is just me doing everything right now, so it will probably take a while to finish. Already have some cool music and sound effect ideas as well. Probably should be concentrating more on the art and programming more. :)

Creating a Good Setup for Mecanim

When starting with any new system or concept, I think it is best to start from scratch. Eliminate all other variables and concentrate on the new functionality or API.  For my journey, that begins inside of my 3d modeling package of choice – Blender.

Creating models and armatures that play well with Mecanim is a pre-requisite. To begin, I studied the Mecanim project in Unity and see how they create, place, and name all of the bones. While all of the bones are required to have a successful setup, I tried to create a rig that has all of the potentials bones ( i.e. eyes, mouth, finger joints).

An important point when rigging is making sure everything is on a 2D plane. You can easily check this by going into the top view of your animation package and  making sure everything is flat.

I didn’t thoroughly test it, but naming the bones the same as the Unity mecanim character helps. This is particularly helpful when rigging the hand all of its joints. If you are interested in the rigging algorithm and how it is calculated, I highly recommend the Auto-Setup of a Humanoid article by Rune Johanson. This guy is crazy smart.

One point that helps auto-setup work is having either bones be perfectly straight up/down, or perfectly left/right. Having the trapezius area or fingers at 45 degree angles can mess up the calculations. A good way to test is to configure the rig and move bones around.

It is easy to move the bones around until you get the rotation correct. You can see in the image above that the rotation is not correct for the left shoulder. Using the rotate tool in Unity, you can see exactly what needs to be done to the armature to put it in the correct T-Pose. Unity does come with an option to automatically fix the pose, but I think it is better to start it off correctly. It is good to have a model that imports perfectly into Unity to streamline the process.

Animation Baking Sweetness ( Pun intended!)

A very important part of Mecanim that hasn’t had much explanation is the animation settings in the Import area. You can get to this area by going to the import settings and clicking the Animation button.

Selecting an animation from the clips will present options on how you want Unity to handle the animations. For my purpose, I am creating the motion inside of my 3d modeling tool. Unity will use the character translations and move the game object based off of it. This type of motion is considered “Root Motion”.

Each Root Transform feature has  ”Bake int Pose” checkbox. This checkbox tells Unity how it should handle animation changes to movement and rotation. If it is unchecked, it means Unity will use the data and update the transform of the game object inside of Unity. If checked, Unity will not update the game object’s transform.

For example, I could have a character animation that skips and bounces up and down. In this case I would NOT want Unity to update the transform when the character is going up and down. Doing this will make a camera follow script bounce up and down as well since it follows a gameobject’s transform.  This would get annoying very quickly.

To avoid this we can bake the root transform position (Y). You can see it in the image above. This will tell Unity to ignore any Y axis changes to the position for the game object it is attached to. The transform will stay grounded now and the camera bouncing will disappear

For running/walking animations, it is good to bake the Root Transform Rotation. With Mecanim, the root position is around the hips. Hips move left to right when running, so the camera will be swinging around the character if you don’t bake the rotation in.

Animation Events

With the first iteration of the Mecanim system, there is a very limited API on what you can access and control. You can change the animation speed for all animations, (animator.speed), but you cannot target a specific animation and update its speed. Making the API more robust is in the roadmap, but for now you have to make due.

A troubling area for me was creating animation events at different points. Since there is no options right now in Mecanim, I was contemplating going back to the old system. Instead, I decided to create a script that will handle animation timing similar to animation events would. The basic setup is like the following:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
 
public class FireBallAttack : MonoBehaviour
{
 
	public GameObject fireballPrefab;
 
	private Animator animator;
	private float attackAnimationLength = 4.1f;
	private float attackDelay = 2.2f;
 
	public void Setup ()
	{
		animator = GetComponent();
 
		animator.SetBool("Attack", true);
		animator.SetLayerWeight(0, 0); //normal animation layer
		animator.SetLayerWeight(1, 0); //additive animation layer
		animator.SetLayerWeight(2, 1); //override animation layer
 
		StartCoroutine("attack");
		StartCoroutine("cleanup");
	}
 
	public IEnumerator attack()
	{	
 
		yield return new WaitForSeconds(attackDelay);
 
		poweringUp.particleSystem.Stop();		
 
		Vector3 fireballPosition = transform.position + (transform.forward*2) + (transform.up*2);
 
		GameObject _tempFireball = (GameObject)Instantiate (fireball, fireballPosition, Quaternion.Euler(transform.forward  ));
		_tempFireball.GetComponent().moveDirection = transform.forward * 15.0f;
 
	}
 
	public IEnumerator cleanup()
	{
		yield return new WaitForSeconds(attackAnimationLength);		
 
		//return to normal layer
		animator.SetLayerWeight(0, 1);
		animator.SetLayerWeight(1, 0);
		animator.SetLayerWeight(2, 0);
		animator.SetBool("Attack", false);	
 
	}
}

Without going line by line, here is a breakdown on what the code is doing:

1. Setup() – will be called externally when you want the animation to start. 
2. Start co-routines attack() and cleanup() to start doing the work
3. Attack() – This is in an IEnumerator so it can use the yield statement. you can do your logic here with instantiating or doing other effects. This attack doesn’t start until 2.2 seconds, so it waits to run the code until the appropriate time. 
4. Cleanup() – Attacking is done when the animation is complete. Destroy any miscellaneous objects you don’t want and set the layer weights back to what they were before. 

I don’t believe you can access the animation clip’s length from the API, so I manually code how long the animation is. Hopefully this property can be accessed in the future releases.

This is more or less the framework I am using for the game I am working on. I will do some posts about my progress in the coming weeks. Because I have multiple attacks, I am actually using an interface and have a controller layer that manages which attack is playing.

In the script above, you will notice that I was changing the  ”Attack” bool to true/false at the beginning and end of the script. This helps other scripts determine whether an attack is in progress or not. You don’t want to  start doing a crazy attack while in the middle of a jump. The SetBool() is accessible from the Animator class, so anything should be able to reference it if needed.

The Road Less Traveled

Mecanim is a great feature in Unity that really helps manage sophisticated animation logic. It still has a ways before it reaches its potential, but I do think that it will get significantly better in the coming releases. Hopefully now you have a better idea of some of Mecanim’s strengths and weakness – as well as how to overcome them.

I have spent about a year now learning to write and arrange music for video games. It has a lot of challenges that I didn’t expect. Here are the songs that I created over the past weekend. Most of the songs I worked on weren’t published to the Global Game Jam site, but I can still post it here!

Dating Simulator ( Anime/JPop music)

Vibe ( Zen/Ethereal)

Heart Invaders ( 8 bit-ish)

Lessons Learned

It is ok to “borrow” song structure for music. When I say structure, I mean the structure of how a song is organized and arranged. For the dating simulator game, I really had no idea where to start with creating that style of music. In these type of situations, YouTube is my first (and usually only) resource. First decent sounding song down the list was “Remember Me” by Cristina Vee . Name doesn’t sound very japanese to me, but the video was pretty anime dating-ish.

If you listen to my song along with the youtube version, you can see where the arrangement and instrumentation are almost identical. I didn’t have a singer, so I threw in a guitar solo. The melody, rhythm, and harmony were all my own, so I wouldn’t consider it too plagiarizing. Most genres use a similar structure in general, so Jpop music uses the common chorus/verse duo that most pop and rock music follows. It would have been nice to have a singer though.

The biggest point I really took home was that game gams aren’t about the final product. Yes, it is nice to show a game you worked on to people, but I think it is REALLY about the entire experience of being with people and working toward a goal.

When you look at game jam game in its final form, it is easy to look on the surface and make judgements based off how good the art is — or what features the developers implemented. What you don’t see is the growth and evolution of people. Stories people remember for years are formed at these events. Relationships begin, and old friendships are enriched.   This is the most rewarding part going to game jams for me.

Sure the latest version of iPad has a higher resolution, faster processor, and more apps in the market — but those don’t matter when all you want to do is draw! The benefits that really sell the ThinkPad as an artist tablet are the following:

• internal stylus that fits into the tablet
• pressure sensitivity pen nib
• low cost

To make it the perfect artist’s companion, I thought the best designed artist tablet has to be comparable to a great sketchbook. It needs to be portable, compact, easy to use, responsive, and fit in my budget.

The Stylus

The stylus on the ThinkPad is the biggest selling point with this tablet. Not only does it fit inside of the tablet so you don’t have to carry it separately, but it actually comes to a point. Most pen nibs ( including Wacom’s tablet pen) has a large rubber tip that feels clumsy. It is really difficult to be very precise and add any detail. In addition to the small pen nib, it also allows for pressure sensitivity.  In all of my searching through the web, I couldn’t find anything else on the market that could compete with this.

Low Cost

Prices are staggering when you look at the range you can spend on a tablet. They range from a couple hundred dollars all of the way into the thousands. Features really start coming into question at this point. What do you really need? The two options that seemed to have the best options were a Window 7 tablet that works with regular Wacom pens. The other option was a ThinkPad, which has a proprietary pen with almost the same functionality ( no eraser on the back like a Wacom).

They both seem to work, but when comparing the prices, the ThinkPad is considerably less expensive. You also can’t put the pen inside of the tablet, so you would have to carry it around and have the potential of losing it that way.

SketchBook Pro

There are multiple flavors of this application on the web: Sketchbook Mobile and Sketchbook Pro. Some people get confused that the mobile version is for all mobile devices. This is not true. The mobile version is for smaller mobile devices like an iPhone.  The screens and interfaces are much larger and are designed for smaller screens. The interface is always in portrait mode with the mobile version.

The regular Sketchbook is for tablets. It is very similar, but the interface is re-arranged to be in landscape mode. There are more interface elements on the screen, as well as more customization options.

The differences between the free “Express” version and the paid “Pro” version are pretty substantial. The biggest advantages of the pro version aren’t new ways to paint, but conveniences that make drawing and painting feel less like work. Also, the free version doesn’t have the latest software updates, so pen pressure support might not work if you are on a newer version of Android.

There are quite a few “hidden” features that are are hard to know about unless you try to swipe every UI element or hold others down. There are also some nice options in the preferences that can allow you to turn off/on various settings.

There are a lot of buttons and brushes, but when it came time for me to do some figure drawing, I felt like most features in the application simply were too much for my taste.

The picture above was a quick 10 minute drawing I did yesterday from a drawing class in St. Louis. When it came to feeling natural as a sketchpad, the only options that I felt comfortable working with were changing brushes and selecting color from the menus on the side menus. Fiddling with brush settings and custom brushes became more of a distraction than anything else. Once you find a few brushes you like, it is probably best to just stick with those .

My favorite brushes are listed from top to bottom on the left brush menu ( use screenshot above for icon reference).

1. water painting – hard to tell based off the brush shape
2. great for inking and sketching
3. has more of a bristle feel to it. good for painting
4. works well with the first brush for water painting
5. paint spackles for some nice flourishs
6. basic sketching with graininess
7. detail eraser for fine tune erasing
8. block eraser for large areas

Conclusion

I am super excited about using the Lenovo ThinkPad more in the future to build my art skills. The portability, pressure-sensitive stylus, and ability to put down ideas quickly is a big win for me.

How does the photoshop app compare? I would love to see some drawings if anyone has been using this device.

Here are a few more drawings from the model in different poses.

They are a huge supporter of open source software and have donated over $450,000 to different projects since their inception.

They are in the process of releasing their 1,000th title.  Congratulations to them!

They have a promotion currently going on where you can get a free gift by signing up for an account (before September 30). Accounts are free.  My best guess is it will be some type of percentage off a book, but who knows.

If you do anything geeky with computers, at least check out Packt’s website for what they have to offer. I have bought quite a few books over the years and have enjoyed just about all of them.

The first half of the post discusses some of the hardware requirements that I thought about when upgrading my laptop to handle audio recording demands. The second half talks about music writing and the recording process as I was trying to recreate a song  from the game Shadow of the Colossus.

Music studies are just like doing drawing studies in my opinion. It is good to look at an object or listen to a song – but much more enriching to recreate it from scratch.

Music Recording Hardware Needs

I recently bought a new laptop for music recording. It just couldn’t keep up with the demands I had. I was fed up with clearing buffers and constantly having to fix the errors it kept giving me, so time for a new one.

I did a lot of research on what is important for audio recording and here are a few things I  learned about how audio recording uses your computer hardware.

CPU – Your DAW(digital audio workstation) uses this for plugins, musical instruments samples, and effects for doing processing. A better CPU means that your system can handle more plugins and effects processing more effectively. It also obviously is needed for your operating system and everything else your computer needs to do.

External Hard Drive – Your computer’s hard drive has a big job to do when it comes to audio recording. What makes hard drives so critical is the amount of audio information that has to be simultaneously written and read. If you have 15 audio tracks, your hard drive has to read all of them separately in real time as well as writing to another one. Coupled with manging the OS and everything else the computer does, it is good to offload some of this read/write burden to a separate hard drive.

RAM – Your CPU has to crunch a lot of the data, but it won’t be able to get the data quick enough if you don’t have a lot of quick RAM. Music sound libraries can be huge. Music libraries can easily be +100GB. The audio samples you buy are very high quality, low compression files that are big. Having more RAM  can help with latency issues as well handling more tracks simultaneously.

Those are the most important hardware concerns that I have seen and experienced first hand. For me, getting 8GB of RAM and an Intel i5 2.4Ghz  CPU is perfectly fine ( and easier on the wallet). Don’t worry about the graphics or video card. Whatever it comes with will be good enough.

Shadow of the Colossus Study

I have always heard from a lot of people how great this game was, so I picked it up about 6 months ago and played through about half of it. If a game takes longer than 8 hours to beat, I get tired of playing it. Grinding and spending hours doing repetitive tasks is something that I relate to work, not play. That is my excuse for not beating it anyway. :)

I thought the music was exceptionally good though, and wanted to learn a lot about what makes it sound the way it does. A great soundtrack to a game or movie really makes it more memorable in my opinion.  Here are some things that I learned about music in general.

Voicing

Lead instruments, especially strings, sound very empty if you are only playing a melody with single notes. Playing octaves really fills the sound out and makes it much stronger. I heard this repeatedly with many of the different themes in “An Opened Way”. Melodies never seem to be by themselves with one instrument. Even having other instrument play in unison seem to make the sound much fuller.

Mixing

Mixing is the art of balancing all of the instruments after they have been recorded. After watching a bunch of videos on mixing as well as going to my local Guitar Center for their free recording lessons, this is an area I thought I have learned the most in recently.

When mixing all of the instruments together, it is important to leave some “head room” in your mix. This means not going to 0dB when you are adjusting your levels. I usually try stay in the yellow area about ( -10dB) when doing everything. Since peaking at the top is 0dB, this gives room for the mastering process to adjust the waveform with any filters needed to give the sound its final touches.

I originally heard some advice to take a finished song that you like and use it as a reference when mixing, but I am finding you have to be very careful with that approach. Since the songs that you hear from iTunes or the radio are mastered, the output is going to be much louder and the dynamic range much smaller than what you should be striving for.

Reverb

There are a few filters that a lot of MIDI instrumentation uses to help it seem more “natural”.  One of the biggest filters I see everyone using is the “reverb” effect. This simulates a sound reflection from a room and it makes the sound appear less mechanical.  There are a few properties that you can alter, but one of the important ones that I haven’t understood before was the “pre-delay”. Pre-delay offsets the reverb so it doesn’t start until later in the note. This allows the notes to have the attack and vibrancy when the notes are first struck.

Adding more reverb also makes the music appear farther away, so it can help make musical passage blend better with other instruments if it is standing out too much.

Reverb is so common that it seems to be one of the overused and abused filters of the music recording industry. Being judicious with its use is important.

Mastering

Mastering is the last part of the music creation process. It takes your song and makes it ready for the masses. Since most speakers can’t output a very high quality sound, the mastering process takes the sound and compresses the waveform so it can sound better on a broader range of speakers. I am starting to use a “Maxim” filter in Pro Tools for this when I started finishing the recording. It seems to do a good job at exposing the lower frequencies in the music and make the overall sound more full. I don’t like going to 0dB for the ceiling, so I bring it down a little.

This phase definitely seemed to normalize the frequencies more so you hear the lower frequencies just as much as the high ones. This seems to sound better for most speakers and ear buds that can’t represent the lower frequencies very well.

 Steel Plates and Other Percussion

There are so many percussion instruments out there that can add a lot to a song. For “An Opened Way”, The closest natural instrument I can find for the odd crashing sound was the steel plates. When you first start using a new instrument into a score and see how it can be used, it is pretty eye-opening how it adds to the texture of the sound. There was some pretty heavy reverb on the instrument which makes it sound less harsh. Using these non-typical percussive sounds seems to be more of an experiment than a science. Here is the final mix of the study

“An Opened Way” Study from Shadow of the Colossus

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, the most difficult things about music composition isn’t software or acoustic issues. All of those issues have technical or scientific solutions that don’t need to be tampered with. The soul of music is much like the soul of art — feelings.

I took piano lessons all throughout highschool and learned some really technical things. The one thing that really made an impact on me was that most people don’t care how technical your work is. It all boils down to how the music makes them feel. I base the quality of a song on how strong it exudes an emotion you are striving for. Everyone has an opinion on what is good and bad, but if the majority of people view the song in a positive light, that is success in my mind. The song has achieved its goal.

Enough writing…back to work!

Here are the results:

Braising Saddles (Western)

切腹の侍 (Seppuku Samurai)  (Japanese)

HD-SD!  (Motivational techno)

Banana Runner  (DDR style techno)

Unknown Game  (Graveyard)

I was thinking about fixing some of the songs after the jam before I posted them, but thought it would take away from the whole idea of a game jam. Some instrumentation is clashing that have close ranges, and some songs didn’t even get a chance to be mixed or mastered. It was a ton of fun though and I learned about some musical styles that I have never touched before. The two that I think came off the best were “Braising Saddles” and “Banana Runner”.  What do you think?

Foundation 3.0 website

One important thing to know is that it really sets up quite a bit for you. I thought it was mostly just going to be about the grid system and media queries, but it is much more helpful than that. The framework includes an amalgam of different plugins and libraries. It uses jQueryand also has responsive components like modal windows (Reveal) and slideshow viewers (Orbit). It is lightweight enough that it is easy to customize and extend. It isn’t supported in IE6, so as long as you are ok with that, it claims to have good support across the board.

It is the first time I have really done a grid-based website, but it made the responsive aspect much easier to implement without worrying about the media queries. Foundation has a lot of useful CSS classes that can show/hide elements based off the size of the screen.

Modifications and Challenges

Besides typical CSS color and position changes, I did a few other things to make it seem less “out of the box”. I created two different navigation systems that were either for large displays or small displays. I added an Easing plugin to make the transitions with the internal links. I also made some custom form validation and AJAX requests for sending emails.

Working with potentially large devices, I ran into the problem of not having high quality images for a lot of my stuff. I didn’t have access to some of the source, so I just did the best I could.

IE9 doesn’t support feature like CSS3 transitions and CSS gradients, so the experience is slightly different on IE. Less than 10% of my visitors use IE, so it isn’t a big concern of mine.

Another point is that background images don’t scale when things are getting resized. This meant I usually created background images taller than I needed. When the screen is smaller, it makes the containers taller, which affect the background images. I just created background images taller than necessary to adjust for screen resizing.

If you check out the website and look at the source code, you can see some more comments that I made.

I will definitely use this framework again for future projects. You still need to know what you are doing in web design, but Foundation is a great aid when creating website. I will definitely be recommending it to other web designers out there.

I was a little hesitant at first with this book thinking it was going to be too childish. The verbiage didn’t have the technical jargon that I was used to from most “how to” books. I have been blown away, though, how informative and helpful the book has been. I guess when you know nothing, you need to be treated as a child. :)

I have only gone through the first two projects, but really feel a sense of accomplishment and progress with what I have done and learned. There are 10+ projects throughout the whole book, so the price (~$13) is well worth it in my opinion if you are just starting off.

Gnome Project: ( ~ 1 hour )

The one thing great about Super Sculpey is that it always stays soft until you put it in the oven to cure (harden). This means you can work with it for a while and put it away. Come back couple days later and continue working on it. The book uses multiple colors of Sculpey, but it really isn’t required.

I only have so much Sculpey, so I actually rolled this project back up into a ball once I was done. With 10+ projects, I don’t want these things filling up my small one bedroom apartment.

Most shapes start off as a ball or snake, and are modified from there using fingers and a couple tools. If I knew what I was doing, I could have done this in 30 minutes, but I spent a lot of time tinkering and playing with the different steps that he provided.

Pixie Project: ( ~ 2 hours )

First thing you might notice is that I realized how poor my backdrop was for the first model. I took a pillow case that had a nice subdued horizontal pattern and draped it from my wall. Looks a little better than the gnome does sitting on my workspace. I tried to iron out all of the wrinkles, but I couldn’t get them all.

This project started introducing creating more human-like faces with the nose and jaws. I also used a small armature (wire) to keep him standing up. I didn’t have any “armature wire”, so I just used a paper clip which worked perfect! The armature is inside of the model like a skeleton, so you can’t see it if you turn him around.