Posing
Find Parts II and III here: Breakdowns and Polishing.
One thing I’m determined to do is to keep animating in 2D and 3D. There are lots of free 3D rigs available online, so I downloaded Tomasz Jurczyk and Carlos Contreras’ horse rig from here. I want to add variety into my reel with some four-legged creatures. Today I found some videos of horses rearing and bouncing about. Then I sketched some quick key poses. 
Next I opened up Maya and, after struggling for a while with the controls (I like mine to be in layers most of the time, so it usually doesn’t look like what’s below – I prefer to only look at the controls for the head, tail etc. if that’s what I’m moving) I posed out the rig using the sketches as reference. If you’re interested in learning Maya (or other software), I’d recommend starting with a simple rig. It can be a little overwhelming at first, but once you’ve learnt a couple of controls adding a few more is much easier. There are many fantastic tutorials online to learn from. 
Below are the key poses for my animation – they tell the story. The horse crouches down, pushes up, kicks out, and settles to a standing pose. 
Though there’s an overview of what happens, there isn’t yet enough detail to show how the body moves from one pose to another. When Maya splines between these poses, the horse moves evenly between poses like a PowerPoint on a default setting. The next stage is to add breakdowns (poses between two keys that describe movement) which I’ll be working on soon.
Find Parts II and III here: Breakdowns and Polishing.
AJAiken 