Gryphon Marionette

[Abdolos]

OK, I'm sick of fixing old stuff.  I want to try something new and complicated.  I've decided that I'm going to try to build a gryphon, or griffin, or however you want to spell it.  I've downloaded some pictures of the mythical creature, as well as of lions and eagles.  I found some good stuff on the structure and working of bird wings, and I expect that I'll be consulting a great book I have that's all pictures of animal skeletons.  My drawing board is a book, and the design work I did in it looks like this:

There are a couple of other ideas mixed in there, but you get the idea.  You can see that I've decided to make the bird part of the creature less eagle-y and more like a nile bird of some kind;  I'm making the beak move, so it has to be bigger to show off the trick.
I've been building in fits and starts for the last two days.  Here is a picture of the separate pieces from a little earlier:

The head is that egg-shaped piece of carved foam-rubber.  Ever wondered how something that was half-bird and half-mammal reproduced?  Turns out they come from eggs!  Here are the two pieces of the jaw on their own:

The black spots are sculpey.  I drilled half-inch holes in that part of the wood and dropped in some ball bearings that I had lying around.  Then I mashed in the sculpey to hold everything in place.  The slightly larger lump has a couple of metal washers worked in as well.  The jaw is counter-balanced so that the string will open it when pulled, which is, I think, more intuitively comfortable for the puppeteer then a string that closes the mouth.  The eye-ring is where the mouth string will attach, and it is in a place where I can reach it to restring when necessary.
Here's later on in the night, when everything is coming together:

Everything is glued together here, and I've built up the foam rubber considerably.  Unfortunately, I forgot to add the wood and eye-rings where the main head strings will go, so I have to cut the stupid thing open tomorrow!  Luckily I've decided to cover the head with chopped up wool, so all of the many seams and imperfections will be hidden.
That's all for now, but I'll try to keep posting over the next few/many weeks as this thing comes together.

[Shawn Sorrell]

This is going to be fun!  Great start so far.  Thanks so much for showing everyone the process.  I know many are confused by moving mouths and yours shows this mech very well.  I did want to say that for counter balance I use lead fishing wieghts.  Lead is soft enough that you can pound it flat or into any shape you want. It also tends to take less material to get the weight you need since it is so heavy.

[Rcdspoon]

can't wait to see the whole process...so far it looks wicked!

[Abdolos]

Update time.  I'm about to go on a big (non-puppet) working jag, so this is the last I'll post for a little while.  I need the time to ponder, anyhow.
I've decided to skip the head connections for now, and go on to the other mechanical problems that this project is all about.  Here are the neck and body blank that I made today:

The neck is all made of dowel, and you can see how the shape that I've cut the individual pieces into restricts some movement and allows others.  I've used this shape for the neck of a human marionette, and it works pretty well.  Restricting movement is important in marionette construction; a totally free joint doesn't have to be anything more than a single string.
Now let's zoom in and see some detail.  Super-macro, go!

Here you can see the little wooden plate that I added to cap off the hole I made for stringing the working jaw.  In the really close-up shot you can see that I've added some spacers between the plate and the bottom of the jaw.  These are so that there is a little space under the plate that a string for the neck can run through without getting pinched.  You might also notice that the neck piece closest to the head is rotated 90 degrees compared to the others.  I hadn't planned to do this originally, but the screws I used to attach the plate got in the way of a neck piece with the same orientation as the others.  I look forward to seeing how the change will work.
Here is the shoulder piece:

It still needs to be embedded in the foam, and I'm not entirely sure how the front legs are going to work, so it's good that I'm being forced to stop for a little while.  Till then, a friend of mine found this drawing of a gryphon skeleton for me:
http://silvergriffin.deviantart.com/art/Griffin-skeleton-43438954
It should be very helpful!

[miguel]

Nice job. I guess in few months I would pay more more attention to marionettes, and start doing that too. You guys are good!

Thanks for sharing!

[Shawn Sorrell]

I think the change in placement of the first neck piece well be advantages.  It seems like it would allow the head to tilt right and left, which would not be possible if you had not made the change.

Have a look at teddy bear or doll joints that you can buy at the hobby store.  It may give you inspiration for the legs.  I actually used them in some dinosaur marionettes that I made.

[Billy D. Fuller]

Very Inter..est...ing !!!

Billy D.

[johian]

A great job so far!

These are lovely dino's you've made there Shawn! Are they totaly made of foam?

Johan

[Shawn Sorrell]

Johan,
The heads are PaperClay and the bodies are foam and fabric with some poly fill.

[Abdolos]

To the fore!
I've managed to steal a few hours and work on the Gryphon.  Here is the bottom piece of the neck with new holes drilled and strung on to the rest of the neck:

The holes on the sides of the larger upper hole are there so that I can tie snug knots in such a confined place.  That little hole in the back is just the tooth that the drill bit I used uses to center itself.
And now the bird legs!  Here's the skeleton with all the major mechanical parts:

The gryphon skeleton drawing I'm working with has combined plantigrade and digitigrade bone structure in a really strange way, but I like it.  I have yet to add the wire armature for the claws, but that's another piece entirely.  All the pieces shown are for the leg structure.  This is actually lying in a way that will be impossible when the stringing is done.  I have yet to add the loops of string that will prevent the various parts of the legs bending in the wrong directions.

Have a look at teddy bear or doll joints that you can buy at the hobby store.  It may give you inspiration for the legs.

Thanks for the suggestion, Shawn.  Though I didn't go look at the joints, you reminded me that I had doll joint pegs lying at the bottom of a box, and I'd never used them.  You can see that that's how the shoulder part of the legs work.
Now here's the whole thong embedded in the foam:

For the larger neck piece, I used my dremel with a sanding barrel to make the hole in the foam.  I used the sanding barrel in the "wrong" way, pushing it in like a drill bit and only then using the sanding sides to widen the hole.  It made a big mess, but worked very well!
Here's everything from the front:

You can see that the shoulders are much wider than the body.  I expect most of the leeway to be taken away when I build foam rubber onto the top sections of the legs.  I'll probably use paper clay to build up on the narrower bottom sections.
Six more days of work coming up, but I expect I'll be able to grab a little more construction time somewhere in there.  Talk to you then!

[Chris Arveson]

Absolutely amazing. I'm not engineer enough to be able to dream up such wonderful creations.

[Abdolos]

A little thing that I learned today and would like to share:  How to drill a dowel from the centre of one end to the centre of the opposite end.  Making the little joints today required ¾" long pieces of dowel drilled from one end to the other.  The more accurate the hole that I drilled, the closer it was to the centre of the end on both sides, the better the joints would work.  My holes were not all that straight.  Why?  This is so simple that I am ashamed to have worked so many years and not done it the right way.  I used to just eyeball the entry point for the drill (which was, it's true, no problem) and then eyeball the exit point and drill along the imaginary line.  I would roll the piece of dowel between my fingers to try to correct any wayward path of the drill.  Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that the imaginary line I was following is not that accurate, and having a real point marked on the end of the dowel that I was drilling to considerably increased my drilling accuracy.  Like I said, I'm ashamed.  I always marked my cuts, why not all my drilling points?  Well, live and learn.

[Abdolos]

How often does a pause in construction mean a change in design?  For me, a lot.  I had some work to do as a stage hand for the Disney On Ice princess show as a dresser, and it turned out that there wasn't actually much to do during the time I was supposed to be there.  As a remedy for boredom, I brought the play that I am working on to work and did a full read-through and annotation.  Once the run of the show was over, I needed some time to update my computerized copy, so I spent three days energetically working on the play.  After that I had some work to do on my giant head puppet, more editing of an earlier play of mine, and I composed some background music for a video of one of my puppets.  Some more back-breaking labour to make money, and here I am.  The point is that I haven't worked much on the gryphon lately, but the pause has made me reconsider how some of it is going to work.  Here are the pieces that I thought were going to be included in the final work:

Most of it is staying, but one thing I've reconsidered is the working of the abdominal joint.  It was going to have a side-to-side motion only, and here is what I made to accomplish that:

But the other evening I visited a friend who wants to make an interesting kind of horse-automaton.  He had done some research on the motion already, and showed me some still shots of a horse running.  He commented on the position of the hips and shoulders and what they had to do with propelling the horse forward.  Though I cautioned him that a truly accurate motion is hard to reproduce, I now find myself wanting more motion in my gryphon's abdomen, and so in the relative positions of the hips and shoulders.  I guess I can't take my own advice.  Anyhow, I'm now going to try to sew some fake fur into the lion hind legs and glue the same fur onto separate pieces of foam to form the abdomen.  I'm hoping this will give the creature some of the sinuous grace of a feline, but we'll see.
In the meantime, I've made the first piece of the wing structure:

By building this thing out of two pieces that I then glued together, I found that I could use my saw and not have to deal with difficult inside corners.  The wings will attach to the forks with more doll-joint pins.  Here you can also see how I misplaced the hole the first time, and had to reinsert the foam that I'd cut away.  Whoops!

[Shawn Sorrell]

Great work as always.  Here is an idea for attachment of the front and back sections of your body. One you could just use a spine of sorts made from a piece of rope. The other is to try and find a slinky that is the right size to connect the two. What is nice about this is that you can cover that with fur an it holds the shape of the body for you yet allows for that serpentine movement.