Animatronic Hybrid Monster

Yury 9XHT

Hello everyone!

Check out practical monster we created for Russian horror movie “Superdeep” 

Creature was designed to move and interact with set and actors
Polyfoam skin is based on steel and fiberglass armature
We used simple mechanics, cable mechanisms, pneumatics and servos to perform movements. 

The whole thing is based on wheeled rig moved by 2 electric engines 1 Kw each

5 puppeteers were involved to operate the creature

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXD0ax4Nq9E

Fabian Lüscher

Love it!
How pleased are you with the pneumatics system? Did that work as expected? In my experience, pneumatics are strong but pretty inaccurate and a bit clunky. Also, expensive, and very hard to have a speed ramp of any movement. Did you have that? Could you control it good enough?

In my project here, i opted to fill my pneumatics with distilled water. i controlled it with another pneumatic cylinder by hand which meant 1:1 control. I had no slack, enormous power and incredible fine control.

Yury 9XHT

We used pneumatics to move the whole creature body on the rig. It was heavy, so we needed a lot of power and we did not need accuracy there. One of the puppeteers controlled the whole thing with just one joystick moving it up and down, left and right, and pneumatic system was like “helping” him. We had a pressure tank on the rig needed to be filled between shots. It worked fine.