Help Animating a Horses Neck

I need some Help with rigging My Horse
http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/117/horsemeshrighelp0pd.th.jpg
The S shape to the rigg is an absolute must because without it I can not atchieve some of the natural positions of a horses neck.
The Problem is in the fact that when I straiten the neck bones the neck takes on an S shape just like the the origanal shape of the rigg.

Please Help and thanks in advace :stuck_out_tongue:

not totaly sure, I had to look up horse musculature and kinematics (ref)

to me your picture looks pretty close to what it should be for bone position and the horses neck position!? is it not?

can you show a pic of what it looks like straight?

well, as I think about it… it seems with the number of bones you have you need to have loads of verticies to be able to control it correctly and those verticies must be correctly paired to the right bone… if you are getting an s-curve in the mesh it seems you need to fix the vertex groups?

edit… reworked a bit

This is what you’d expect though. The short answer to your problem is: don’t straighten the neck. It is already straight. It is very difficult to make a rig that can’t be broken by the animator. At some point you have to trust the animator to not extend the rig beyond its limits.

Very nice model btw!

Yes, as I have discoverd that is very true.
The Problem lies in the fact that a horse can nearly completly straiten the bones in there neck, this is what allows them to reach the ground while graising and snaking their neck.
What I was hopeing for help with is seting up some muscle bones in the neck that are controlled by the base rigg shown in the picture.

I hope that clears things up a bit :wink: .

Oh I should also add the fact that this is my first model and rigg in any program so I need all the help I can get. %| :-?

you could just make the S shape less extreme (closer to straight) that way, the neck will still tend to bend in the way you desire, but there’s less room for it to get zoinked when it is pulled too much.

nice horse model, btw

I agree: simulating the muscles may be the way to go here. Try adding some bones where the muscles go and use the stretch-to constraint to give them muscle-like functionality. Then skin the mesh on to the muscles instead of the neck bones.

I Have Tried setting up some muscle bones at the top and bottom of the neck
and they seem to be working ok for now but I am not sure how well they will
work when I animate him though.
http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/7956/horsemeshrighelp2vv.th.jpg

Hi I hav’nt posted anything for a while.
Lost Internet for a while and I hav’nt the rigg very often because I got a little disceraged by the complexity of a horses neck.
But I have made some real progress, here are the results so far.

http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/1892/horsemeshrighelp7xe.th.jpghttp://img517.imageshack.us/img517/6818/horsemeshrighelp8qf.th.jpg

Does anyone know how to mirror constraints, if there is a way?
Because that would shure save a lot of time over doing it manually.:confused:
and I got the pictures to show up now, that was the reason I had not posted in a while.
[http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/943/latestwork2jo.th.jpghttp://img244.imageshack.us/img244/1500/latestwork6wz.th.jpg](http://img244.imageshack.us/my.php?image=latestwork6wz.jpg)
:D:D:D

You can’t mirror Armatures or Constraints (except X-Mirror in Edit mode), but you can Copy a Constraint from the Active bone to all other Selected bones with Ctrl-C. Warning: if the Active bone uses a Target Object all copies will use that same target.

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