In the first brief we were given we had to animate a quadruped of our choice. I choose to animate a horse I found this to be the hardest of all the exercises I really struggled to get the basic movement right when I first started to draw the sequence.
For the first part of the project we drew a monkey skeleton from a model skeleton
On the left is the full monkey skeleton and on the right is a leg from a dog skeleton.
This was my first attempt at animating the horse I found it really hard to get the movement right looking at references from youtube. I then looked at the book The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams pages 356 – 359 really helped me to understand the movement better. I also found the video below from youtube, which really helped me discern the leg and joint movement.
I then started from scratch and kept it really simple just by drawing stick legs to begin with to make sure I got the movement correct.
From this I then started to build up the shape of the horse.
From that I was able to finish both the walk cycle and run cycle (just legs) relatively quickly. However in hindsight I should have added the head and body as I went rather than at the end because it made it a lot harder having to go back and redraw frames.
What also didn’t help was that I didn’t is that I did both the walk and run cycle on separate files so when it came to doing the in-between running and walking it was difficult because the horse had changed shape.
I found adding the head and tail very hard because the proportion of the horse was entirely wrong. However I found a really good stopping reference on youtube that helped me see the motion really clearly. But I felt like I rushed the stop and it could be refined more as it still feels like it doesn’t put enough pressure on the floor when it stops
Below is the final full horse animation
It still needs refining the head movement needs to be more exaggerated and the general shape of the horse varies a lot. The in-between and stop also needed a bit more work but overall I’m pleased with the outcome of the animation.
Advanced Animation Skills 