Find parts I and III here: Posing and Polishing.

What with Christmas, applying for jobs, and so on, it’s taken me longer than I hoped to do some more work with my horse animation. Today I’ve had the chance to do so! To find my first post about this animation, click here.

I began by looking at my reference video again. My first pose (horse crouched down) was from frame 2,

and my second pose (horse in the air) was from frame 6.

I found my breakdown pose on frame 5.

This is important for describing the action because it shows when the feet lift from the ground. Rather than the horse drifting upwards, it will lift up suddenly.

I repeated this process of “breaking down” the movement between each set of key poses for the whole animation. I also adjusted the posing and timing of the keys when necessary. Once I had all my keys and breakdowns, my Maya file looked like this:

The graph editor shows how the horse moves between keys. In the image above, the position holds until the next key: it’s stepped. This is somewhat like 2D animation (which is often shot on “twos”, or twelve frames a second; in other words, held for two frames) which I’ve found familiar and very helpful.

When I’m happy with the keys and breakdowns at the stepped stage, I spline it. That means taking the stepped graph editor and turning it into this:

You can see the different stages of the animation in the video below: