Foot Armature

I thought I would do a post of how I made the armature for his feet. After taking some amazing information from Josh and Nathan Flynn's blog, which you can find here...

http://joshua-flynn.blogspot.co.uk/

http://nathan-flynn.blogspot.co.uk/

I then began building the armature!

I began my cutting 2 foot shapes out of a steel sheet, once i had the shapes I then cut about 1/3 way down from the toes, which would enable the front and the back of the foot to be separate. K+S was then glued with epoxy to the steel, which would enable wire to run through them to allow me to animate them.

I Also drilled holes in the front of the foot to allow a nut to be glued there for the use of tie downs. 

The good thing about using the steel foot would be that I am not restricted to using the tie down method. As steel is magnetic it would allow me to keep my puppet secure with magnets under my stage, eliminating the worry of having to drill in to my stage and causing a right mess!

Which I don't really need!  

Constructed foot with wire and heat shrink! 

Let's Build an Armature!

The re design of Blob has finished. Now for the build! 

I began by doing an armature sheet on Photoshop to help me with my build. This allowed me to print it out and measure all my materials up against it. 

My plan is to make the arms, legs and feet replaceable just incase wire snaps within them or the silicone tears!  

On to building!  I cleared a space to build on my desk, printed the armature sheet out and began!

 

.......

After A LOT sawing and twisting wire the armature was done! 

 

Soo, a lot of things has gone on here that may have slipped my mind to document with photos.

Whoops!

But il try and clarify what I've done! After all K+S brass square pieces were cut to length and wire twisted I began by covering the wire in heat shrink wrap! which I do have a picture of, well done to me on that! 

As you can see from the heat shrink above,  it secure's very tight around the wire. The wire closest to camera shows half of the heat shrink heated to the wire and the other half in it's original state :)

Heat shrink is used to give added protection and longevity to the wire as wire will eventually snap! 

After this was done i began glueing the wire in to the correct K+S pieces with epoxy glue. Miliput (the yellow stuff) was used to block the ends of K+S peaces to ensure once the smaller K+S was inside that they then didn't pop out the other end. Also the miliput was used as and extra adhesive to secure the K+S pieces to the metal sheet. 

You may wonder what the funny looking antenna pieces are, on top of his head. These will be eyebrow paddles, once the armature is cast in silicone, in theory, the eyebrow will be animatable.

Emphasis on 'In theory'!