Ankylosaurus magniventris
Not a whole lot to say about this one, pretty quick and dirty build. VelociJACKtor proposed a dino collab to feature in his academic studies and I was immediately interested, but it ended up being a busy time of my life without as much creative energy as I would have liked. I chose the ankylosaurus partially because I knew it could be a pretty quick and easy build if I needed it to be.
I knew going into it that I wanted to try using the hexagonal HF armor add-ons as the back armor so I figured that was most of the design work done right there (this is not actually how things work, but go with it). I spent a build session or two on the head, which I am pretty happy with, and which was largely a way to familiarize myself with the at the time new-to-me finger parts.
Then I did the rest in just two more sessions after that, speed building as best as I could. I know 4 building sessions doesn't sound that quick, but for me to put a whole MOC together start to finish in 5-10 hrs of work is very rare. Being a quick build, there's a lot going on in the body that could use improvement. I primarily used these three reference images to inform the spike pattern and proportions.
I did spend a while trying to decide on a color scheme. As these things are wont to do, the initial colors that I went with as a temporary solution ended up being the final colors. I was never going to be using bright bold colors for this but there was some debate of light blue-ish grey vs dark, tan vs dark tan, black vs light blue-ish grey, and which part should each of those colors apply to.
Transitions aren't as smooth as they should be and there is clearly not enough mass under the base of the tail, behind and between the rear legs. The legs were partially reused from my Bio-cup 2024 Round 3 styracasaurus, and the tail was basically an afterthought with armor plates just strung onto flextube.
The little rock and tree are just the traditional composition for a simple animal MOC with not a lot going on, just a few pieces thrown together. I also experimented with the blue photo background with this guy and that was a major mistake, I'll be sticking with grayscale backgrounds going forward.
Here's a slight alternate angle which is the only other photo of the complete build that exists.
