Industrial Design · rfalconvargas
Maip — Dinosaur Animatronic
Maip is a servo-driven dinosaur animatronic, pairing a sculpted Blender form with a hand-fabricated wooden articulation skeleton. The body was modeled digitally, prototyped as a wire-and-wood armature, then driven by high-torque servos seated in custom-milled wooden cradles for the head and arms — documented from CG render to low-fidelity mechanical mock-up to a wired, moving figure.
Discipline
Industrial Design
Medium
Animatronic · Hardware-software
Gallery
Selected frames
Reflection
Reflection
Maip was where I stopped treating a creature as just a shape and started treating it as a system that has to actually move. I sculpted the silhouette in Blender first, but the real design problem was hidden in those little milled wooden brackets — getting a servo to sit at the right pivot so the head reads as alive instead of twitching. Building the armature by hand taught me how much industrial design is reconciling the clean digital model with the messy torque, wiring, and tolerances of the physical build.
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