Building the Alloceratops Armature, Part 1

Priour to recieving my armature parts from animation toolkit I started to look into Ray Harryhausen's designs of his own ceratopsian dinosaurs. Studying both his original Triceratops armature from the 1930's and the plans from his One Million Years B.C design. It was quite interesting to compare the two together, seeing how much Ray has learned since his early days of armature engineering to his peak of his career work. 

"Evolution of the World" Triceratops armature.

I noticed major changes between the two designs, the first one obviously been the number of joints in the puppets. In Evolution the are numerous joints sharing the same ball joint and the use of ribs to keep the core hollow, which also appear to be fixed in position; whilst the One Million Triceratops has lost the ribs and uses a much "sleeker" design, this could display the lessons learned from Ray's earlier attempts or that the particular method of armature building was more cumbersome than his later methods. One thing that isn't clear from either image is how big the sizes are between the two puppets.

"One Million Years B.C." Triceratops armature design.
© The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation - Photgraphy by Andy Johnson

Once I started to see the patterns in the armature construction I started to block out the design of my armature by placing tracing paper over the newly re-scaled design. I also took into consideration that due to the style of the body plan I not only had to design the side profile but the facing profile as well, much in the same manner Ray had done previously.

Front and Rear plans for the "One Million Years B.C." Triceratops, most likely to help with both armature construction and sculpting to the exact scale.
© The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation - Photgraphy by Andy Johnson

This is to make sure that the spacing of the joints in places such as the shoulder and hips are moderately spaced rather than being too close to the center frame, where it would become difficult to move the joints or too far apart making the puppet too wide for animation. It also helps working out the positions of joints that maybe difficult to capture visually from one perspective alone.

Seeing as this design was a first draft of my armature, I made certain calls of judgement regarding the weight this puppet could possibly end up. 6mm Joints are quite light for a puppet of this scale so I knew straight away that this would be no problem for areas such as a the lower legs and tail. However, from past experiences with making a large bodied character I decided to use 9mm and 12mm joints to counteract any possible resistance from the foam and latex later on. I could discover that once fleshed out and skinned the puppet would easily have worked with 6mm joints, but I would rather make the call and have a semi heavy puppet, than have a light puppet that can barely move without bouncing back into a previous position.

I made notes as I went along measuring distances between ball joints and plausible weight guesstimations as to how heavy this puppet could become. I also took into account the weight of the torso and hip sections of the armature, I decided to use a XL hip ring as this was a strong perfectly sized piece of kit that I could grasp without sinking my fingers too deeply into the puppet, but I had originally planned to use two halves of the same ring for both ends of the mid section, this turned out to be a little too heavy for my liking so I decided to cut out the torso section out of 1mm sheet metal, which is much lighter than half of a hip ring.

The other dilemma I faced was the double joints. Observing Ray's original armature plans for the One Million Triceratops, I could see he used single joints in from the shoulder and hip down to the elbow and knee, whilst I would be using double joints which would mean that the joint would be far too flexable to act as a traditional limb motion.

I decided to solder one ball joint onto the plate since it was a technique Animation Toolkit used on their Chuck Steel Trampire puppets and judging by the comments from the Animortal team it seems to have worked nicely. The one thing about this technique is that you have to make sure your rods are in the correct position using rigs and a straight surface to make the joint functionable. But too much solder can increase the weight of the armature so again I had to be very careful about how much I was using, as I've mentioned in previous blog post the weight of the puppet is important just as much as the functionality of the puppet.

When it came to designing the skull I decided to take a different route, Ray sculpted his armature skulls using mediums like woods, reins and steel, I wanted to try use a modern approach and use a  3D printed version instead. I'm currently talking to one of the MA product design students to work out a basic 3D form to be printed out so that I can use it as the basis of my sculpture and hopefully for the casting of the final armature skull.

In the mean time, what I have made is a brass rig for the upper skull to slide onto and a lower jaw joint that will likely at this stage need further shaping.

This is the current state of the Alloceratops armature at present, There is still much work to be done on this armature, adding pelvis bones to the hips and grinding down unwanted edges to both reduce weight and to give a slicker bone quality, so hopefully by the next blog post there will be a noticeable difference in the design.