Introduction
After studying the walking animations of horses, running animations of dogs, and animations of reptiles and birds, I think I can start making creature animations now. Of course I don’t know if I can finish it on time, but in order to finish my showreel, I will make it seriously. If you are interested in my reference and research, you can read it here:
Horse’s walk Animation
This is the model I selected. There are no complicated controllers and no hairs. In fact, according to the reference, the horse’s walking should be less than 24F, but for convenience, I will key according to 24F first, and then make adjustments.
I put out the first pose first, this is to decide the pose of 1F and 24F. I made it according to three references. At the position of the right front foot, I felt that the horse’s foot was too straight. After observing it, I found that the leg was slightly curved at this time, although it was very subtle. I can achieve the bending effect by moving the thigh muscles forward, which is also the result obtained by observing another reference. In addition, the position of the front waist, back waist and neck of the horse must be determined at this time, and they all have their own movement rules.
I almost forgot to adjust the position of the thigh base of each leg.
What’s more embarrassing is that I don’t know which step I should key anymore, even if I follow the reference. So I decided to start with the front foot first. After all, the walking animation of a horse can be regarded as two people walking. When making the animation of the front foot, I first determined the height change of the horse in the contact, down, and up states, and then made the animation details of the foot.
I think I over-adjusted the thigh controllers, causing the horse’s legs to grow and become shorter. In addition, I know that after the feet are in contact with the ground, the thighs are always in a state of being unable to bend, but I found that although I can keep upright on the keyframes, the legs will bend on the breakdown, which looks strange.
Because I am doing cycle, I want to copy the parameters directly, but it seems that doing so will cause the animation to be very strange, so I can only manually adjust them one by one. Of course, I ultimately hope that the motion trajectory is 8 shape, and I try to do this as much as possible.
After adjusting the horse’s movement on Translate X, the animation of the horse’s front legs was roughly done by me.
Now I start to do the motion animation of the back legs. As you can see from the reference, the changes of the back legs are different from the front legs, because it needs to ensure that the legs are always bent. I was confused about the height of the hind legs for a long time at first, because the movement of the hind legs was 3/4 slower than that of the front legs. I needed to focus on keying so as not to be disturbed by this time difference.
I just keyed my right leg, but this has already confused me. I always feel that the horse’s movements are a bit pop, especially the moment when the foot is raised. So I modified the position of the feet in each frame again, try to get closer to them.
I did the animation of the left leg in the same way. Similarly, I want to make sure that the horse’s left thigh is 8 shape.
By the way, the movement of the head is the same as the movement of the hind legs.
Of course, the tail and abdomen also have movement changes. I checked the reference. In the real video, the tail basically does not change with body changes. It may depend on the wind speed or the horse’s own movement. So I kept the same movement of 1F and 24F, only the key changed a little.
This is a walking animation of a horse that I made temporarily, although it seems a bit fast.
Conclusion
To be honest, when I was doing creature animation, I obviously felt very difficult. Although I know that the muscle movements of animals and humans are similar in some respects, because they do not belong to the same type of creature, their animations are very different in detail. For example, they also have contact poses, but the bending of horse’s knees is completely different from that of humans. So my animation can only be temporarily adjusted to this, I hope Luke can give some suggestions to make my animation more natural.