For this years AnimeNEXT, I am planning to create a Wheatley puppet. Wheatley is a character from the videogame Portal 2. However, since he is an A.I, he is composed of metal. Any suggestions of how to create this affect would be greatly appreciated, though I'm pretty sure I'm narrowing that one down. My main issue is the eyelids. Unlike most eyelids, Wheatley's are flat. I am in need of help for the eyelid mechanism, preferably using a rig. That is my main issue. Another detail is the LED eye. The eye is lighting up. In all my years of puppetry and fursuiting I have NEVER worked with lights. Any suggestions would also be helpful. If you are not familiar with the character simply search 'Portal 2 Wheatley' on YouTube for his appearance and basic movement. Have any suggestions regarding other elements of the puppet? Feel free to post them!

Welcome to Puppets and Stuff.  Here is a blog post over at Furin Cosplay about how one person did this. http://furincosplay.blogspot.com/2011/07/wheatley.html

Yes, I have read that blog before. It certainly helped for the metal effect. I did look at the drawn out plans she made but the eyelid mechanism she used still has me baffled. I saved the images for a closer look and future reference but I still need a little background knowledge on it. IF I find I cannot figure it out, than I may try a new method.

I think maybe she ended up doing the eyes a bit different then in her drawings but the basic concept I think was the same. You have a spring or elastic that holds the eyelids open. Then your run a string from the bottom point of the eyelid to the center of the eye for each eyelid to pull them closed.  I kind of think that on the end puppet she has a string on the outside bottom of each eyelid that runs to the center line then back to the control most likely joining into one line for each eyelid so they can be closed independent of each other.   It also looks like she changed them from curved to just flat eyelids. In one of the pictures you can see the pieces layed out and the two eyelids look like maybe the have a hollow tube on each side. Those tubes could have been threaded onto a solid tube on each side of the eye so that they could slide up and down on the rod. Then ad your tension with elastic or springs to the top of that and the pull strings to the bottom.  Make sense?