Week 4 Horse trot - Hierarchical approach to animating a cycle

These next few weeks are designed to help the student create a workflow for animating a cycle. Please follow the workflow given. We will be using a hierarchical approach where the movement is layered starting with the root, rather than a pose to pose approach where the key poses are created for all the nodes of the creature then inbetweened.

Animators will be asked to use reference, analyze it, and interpret as necessary to get a believable performance

The first step is to block out the major movement of the horse trot, starting with the up and down motion of the hips (horse_v2:ct_COG_CTRL). Before you do so, familiarize yourself with the horse trot reference posted above. Understanding the movement and mechanics of the horse trot is crucial. I often like to think as the hips and chest of the horse as two opposing bouncing balls. This helps me lock down the timing in the movement of these two areas. Once you have studied the live action reference, look at the thumbnail and hand-out reference. Keep in mind that this is someone's interpretation of the movement. Nothing replaces studying live action reference. Life is your best teacher. However looking at thumbnails, and someone else's analysis of the movement can help us understand the movement, and see something that we didn't notice was there before.

To Start:

start up maya

Create your maya project file

Copy file horse_v2.mb from student pickup to your work area

File->Project->Set your maya project file

reference the horse maya file

File -> create reference

horse_v2.mb

horse_v2:ct_COG_CTRL

STEP 1 :Get the up and down timing of the root

the keys are 1(down) 5(up) 9(down) 13(up)

On the other keys 3 7 11 15 the body is 1/3 closer to top keys 5 and 13

To slow down the cycle to 18 frames instead of 16, add 2 drawings

between 4 and 5 (up) and 12 and 13 (up)

new keys 1 (down) 6 (up) 10 (down) 15 (up)

and 19 is the same frame as 1

STEP 2 :Rough out the gestures for the feet placement, passing position and contact. Do the back legs first. These will be copied to the front legs.

TIPS : The springiness in the steps is from the ligaments in the foot of the horse.

Check the arcs and spacing of the joints on the foot and leg of the horse as the legs fold and stretch. Plot the arcs using a draw tool on the computer.

This illustration is from the Preston Blair book, showing how the legs fold up and stretch out with the body.

Homework: Block in the up and down movement of the body using the COG (root) node. Now rough in the movement of the legs under the body using the feet controllers. Use the circular controllers at the top of the leg, frontLeg_CTRL and rearLegCTRL to make the leg stretch and compress as it folds up and stretches out. TIP: If you have problems with the model using maya 11, then use an older version of maya. I suggest maya 10.0. Follow the reference, thumbnails, and illustrations given.