About
Armin Soleimani (Soleimanboroujerdi) is a 3D animator, character TD, CG supervisor, and professional stop motion armature maker. He has been working in the animation industry since 2009, and with his specialty in 3D character rigging, he became interested in the stop motion armature-making process and began to make and sell armatures and rigs. Since 2015, he has worked on many projects and collaborated with many artists to bring their imagination into life in the stop motion artform. Currently, he is shipping his products under the name of Stop Motion Joy (S.M.J) worldwide.
The Process
The process of making an armature begins with the design. Since armature plates for most of the armatures are laser-cut, they are needed to be designed by engineering programs that are capable of producing vector-based designs.
After completion of the design, parts are cut out from metal sheets by going through the CNC laser-cut process. This process is very precise and is done by professional operators. The precision of a cut for a 2mm metal sheet is around 0.1mm. After the laser-cut process, dirty and unpolished parts go through the polishing process to get a clean surface and edges.
Meanwhile, An assembly sheet based on a character design is created, for which a 3D software is used to get very precise measurements down to one of a hundredth of a cm. After measurements are done, drilled balls get silver-soldered to rods, get cleaned, and alongside some other parts, go through nickel-chrome plating process to make them corrosion-resistance.
Finally, after everything is ready, it is assembly and testing time. parts get assembled and joints get tested to make sure of their health and smoothness. Any inconvenience will result in a part replacement, this way we make sure that armatures will deliver the task of animating with confidence.
