Building the Alloceratops Armature, Part 2

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After my last post of the Alloceratops armature, I started to notice some "flaws" in the design, mainly with the front and rear legs, but also with the future issue of gripping the puppets mid section and the length of the tail.

I made minor changes to the armature design but these would play a big change in the puppets overall performance.


The front legs in my earlier design had issues with holding the puppet up and the rear legs seemed to be too short during a stride due to the fussed single ankle joint. when looking at Ray's Evolution puppets and One Million Years BC puppet, I realized the scales where vastly different, resulting in the armatures for both requiring different engineering solutions. The front legs would crumple up due to the scale of my puppet, but the scale of Ray's triceratops in One Million Years BC was larger and therefore the joint was much easier to control. So I have since swapped to a long double plated joint. As a test for myself I also added toes to the front feet, I wanted to push myself to make double jointed toes to give further performance to the ceratopcian walk and during scenes of drama.
As for the Rear legs, a simple case of raising the foot plate up to accommodate the stride worked much better. Also the length of the tail needed to be increased to allow more performance of emotion.

Adding the mid section ring in the gut of the beast was a slight challenge, not old to find a central point where the soldier would not interfere with the screw or threaded section of the joint but also sit in the right position to allow me to grip and animate the puppet.


The armature is now ready for foam fabrication.

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