This Bill Cipher Animatronic Summoned Into Our Reality

Gravity Falls is one of those quirky animated series that fans love for the intelligent humor and memorable characters. The primary antagonist is an entity called Bill Cipher, who is a kind of interdimensional demon dude. He looks like a 2D representation of a pyramid with a big eye in the middle — an allusion to the Eye of Providence associated with the Freemasons and present on the US one-dollar bill. That visage may be difficult to translate into a 3D character, but Jaimie and Jay of Wicked Makers didn’t let that stop them from making this awesome Bill Cipher animatronic.

The obvious solution would be to make the body in the shape of a pyramid, but that wouldn’t actually represent the Bill Cipher character very well. In Gravity Falls, we do see Bill Cipher from the side on occasion and he’s usually drawn as a 2D triangle with a bit of thickness. That’s what the Wicked Makers replicated here.

The sculpted the body from foam, which let them carve in the blocky appearance of stereotypical pyramids. That body has a fairly wide seam between the front and back side, which gave the Wicked Makers a space to illuminate. They did that to give the animatronic a glowing characteristic that matches the onscreen representation.

Bill Cipher doesn’t have much of a face to move around, which is how the Wicked Makers would normally bring an animatronic to life. But he does have a big eyeball to express himself. That eyeball is what they actuated to add movement and interest. Three small hobby servo motors rotate the eye horizontally and vertically, and also open and close the eyelid. The eye and its parts were modeled in CAD and then 3D-printed. Another two servo motors, a bit larger, move Bill’s body on the welded steel stand on which it sits.

As with some of their other recent projects, the Wicked Makers chose to use Bottango software to animate Bill Cipher’s movements. You can use Bottango with popular development boards on the market, like those from Arduino, but Bottango is just about to release a dedicated board called the Solar and the Wicked Makers were able to get their hands on one. It made the hardware setup as simple and easy as it can be.

With some paint, weathering, and creative voice recording, the Wicked Makers were done and ready to summon Bill Cipher into our reality. The resulting animatronic looks great and is a delight to see in action.