Books on how to make animatronics for decor, holiday decorations and film.
Browse our selection of animatronics books and find the perfect guide for your next project. With clear instructions and expert tips, these books will help you create complex, mesmerizing animated displays that will impress and delight your audience.
If you’re interested in bringing your holiday decorations to life or creating your own animated props, you’ve come to the right place. Our guide features a wide selection of books on animatronics, from beginner guides to advanced technical manuals.
Making Things Move
DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists
By Dustyn Roberts
A unique guide that covers the practical principles of mechanical design and how they can be applied
In Making Things Move, you’ll learn how to create moving mechanisms using clear, non-technical explanations, examples, and hands-on projects. These projects range from artistic installations to toys to useful inventions, and include a drawing machine, a mini wind turbine, and a mousetrap powered car. You’ll learn a wide range of skills, from attaching couplers and shafts to motors to converting between rotary and linear motion. The only limit to what you can create is your imagination.
Discover how to:
Find and select materials
Fasten and join parts
Measure force, friction and torque
Understand mechanical and electrical power, work and energy
Create and control motion
Work with bearings, couplers, gears, screws, and springs
Combine simple machines for work and fun
This book is filled with photographs, drawings, and screenshots of the components and systems you’ll be working with. It focuses on using ready-made components whenever possible, and most projects use common materials like metal, plastic, wood, and cardboard, as well as simple fabrication techniques like laser cutting. Each chapter includes small projects to help you practice what you’ve learned, and later in the book, you’ll tackle more involved projects that incorporate material from multiple chapters.
Making Things Move:
Focuses on practical applications and results, not abstract engineering theories
Contains more than a dozen topic-focused projects and three large-scale projects incorporating lessons from the whole book
Features shopping lists and guides to off-the-shelf components for the projects
Incorporates discussions of new fabrication techniques such as laser cutting and 3D printing, and how you can gain access
Includes online component for continuing education with the book’s companion website and blog (makingthingsmove.com)
-Hands-on coverage of moving mechanisms
-Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines
-Materials and Where to Find Them
-Screwed or Glued? On Fastening and Joining Parts
-Forces, Friction and Torque (Oh My)
-Mechanical and Electrical Power, Work, and Energy
-Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Motor? – Creating and Controlling Motion
-The Guts: Bearings, Bushings. Couplers, and Gears
-Rotary vs. Linear Motion
-Automatons and Mechanical Toys
-Making Things and Getting Them Made
-Projects
Edwin Wise’s book, Animatronics: A Guide to Animated Holiday Displays, is the perfect guide for bringing your holiday decorations to life. This hands-on, project-oriented book covers simple, classic projects and advanced motion animation used in professional mechatronic systems. Along the way, it includes tips and tricks for sculpting and decorating all your self-operated mechanisms.
While other books on the market describe only static displays, this book provides the advanced hobbyist with the tools needed to create a complex animated display. The book is targeted at intermediate and advanced builders and covers four broad categories: – electrical animations – pneumatic animations – servo animations – control systems
It also includes “background” projects such as stationary systems and how to make water glow under black light.
Animatronics guides you through projects to build and control AC motors and pneumatic systems inside your animated props. It also includes some overlap with Wise’s previous book, Applied Robotics, dealing with sensor and MCU control projects. Whether you’re a seasoned animatronics expert or just getting started, this book has something for everyone.”
This guide, adapted from the popular SERVO Magazine series “DIY Animatronics” by Steve Koci, is tailored for home hobbyists who want to learn about the exciting field of animated character creation.
It aims to be accessible to anyone with a desire to learn, regardless of their expertise. The guide covers the entire process of creating animatronic characters, from start to finish, and provides clear, easy-to-follow instructions.
Whether you’re working on a holiday decoration, school project, or business project, DIY Animatronics will help you create professional-quality animatronic characters.
Affordable Animatronics provides all the elements for an individual to build their own animated models (i.e. people, animals, aliens, etc.) for personal and professional use. Introductions to controllers, electrical, mechanical, lighting, and sound techniques provides all the basics that a novice or professional needs to get started. The book provides pictures, drawings and instructions for creating realistic and affordable projects, so the reader can apply these techniques by making their own animatronic solutions. This book is a must for creators of holiday displays, robotic and animatronic courses, and current and future sci-fi movie producers.
Harry’s Affordable Animatronics – How to Guide – Volume 2
By Robert Van Deest, Harry Lapping and Jim Litchko
Harry’s Affordable Animatronics, How to Guide, Volume 2, is the follow-on to Volume 1, which provides all the elements for an individual to build their own animated models. Volume 2 show the application of these elements in constructing realistic animatronics from boxes and puppets to produce and animated quill, owl, talking hat, and dragon. This book will take you to the next level of creating your own animated creations.
We’ve all seen them: horror movies starring a creepy doll that tries to kill everyone in the house, usually because it’s been possessed by a vengeful ghost or a demon. It always starts small, though: little movements, like the head turning, that let you know that something’s not quite right about little Samantha’s favorite toy. Then, by the end of the movie, the doll is in fully-possessed-mode, flying through the air and slaughtering everyone.
Meet Amanda. Amanda is a possessed doll that, with the help of a smattering of code, randomly turns her head left, right, and sometimes all the way around. It’s not much, but it’s enough to make your favorite horror fan run screaming from the room.
Illustrated with full-color photographs, this volume of Halloween Animatronics takes you step-by-step through the process of creating her, from cutting open her head to swap out her eyes, to mounting the servo that turns her head, to the few lines of code to make the servo work its magic.
If you already have an Arduino, she can be built for under $40 in parts, and an Arduino can be gotten very cheaply if you need one. For those wanting to create spooky Halloween props and get introduced to animatronics, the Arduino, and robotics in general, this book is a must-have!
This guide shows you how to build a radio-controlled zombie named Bartok with lots of pictures to help you. It tells you what parts you need and how to put them together step by step. You’ll learn how to make Bartok’s body, his arms, and how to make him crawl when you want him to.
There’s also information for people who are new to this hobby and tips for fixing problems. If you love Halloween and want to make your own creepy prop, you don’t want to miss this guide!
It’s aliiiiive! Bring characters to life for Halloween, movie making, and live shows with the mechanical wonders of animatronics!
In this issue of Make:follow along as FX designer Jesse Velez builds a custom haunted deer animatronic based on the Evil Dead series. Next, we show you how to make a set of 3D-printed ghosts dance to music using Bottango’s free animatronic software. Then add some personality to your next creature build with a pair of simple, lifelike mechatronic eyes, and take it a step further with a mechanism to simulate realistic breathing patterns.
Plus, 33+ projects:
Use projection mapping to make any building a screen for multimedia shows, at Halloween or anytime
Build a sunlight sensing plant rotator so your leafy friends always get the best light
Learn to make perfectly aligned vector images from skewed photographs
Explore hidden frequencies with an EMF audio amplifier
Make a traditional tortilla press for the freshest tacos
Hack a monster toy with a simple LED circuit for a whimsical desktop status light
Do you know of any books that should be on this list? We'd love to hear from you - get in touch! We're always looking to expand our collection with books covering makeup artists, monster makers, special effects, prop making, stagecraft, and more.
Disclaimer: All information on this website is provided for informational purposes only. SFXzone is not responsible for any injuries, damages, or losses resulting from the use or misuse of the information provided.
