Hello, I’m trying to animate a child drawed horse, but I can’t even make a simple running animation.
I make a small video to show the problem here, around the frame #40 the front of the horse seems to stop before going up again.
I’m using IK for legs, arms, and head and the positions I set are correct, so I don’t see how I can’t correct that. I know I can modify the curves but smooth curve shouldn’t do that, so I don’t understand.
Can someone light up my lantern ?
Thanks
The animation is not horrible, as it is still believable and readable in some sense; however, to read and recognize this motion as a legit Horse one, the animations lacks naturalist observation from real Horses and reference.
One main problem in 4-legged Animal Motion/Animation, is that the synchrony of such Legs do not respect common sense (Horses and alike are notably odd); the Timing (a fundamental time and space relational concept in the Animation arts and field) for these legs, from a shallow investigation, is all ‘broken’, but ideally should be analyzed properly observing real footage of Horses legs motions in slow-motion and even frame by frame; but there are some photographic references like classical book from Muybridge:
https://www.google.com/search?q=muybridge+horse&client=firefox-b-lm&sxsrf=AJOqlzW--xnxAOaE9-hCo4Ad2262fpw7zw:1674427110273&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwior_CIn9z8AhXsvJUCHSXrCpYQ_AUoAXoECAMQAw&biw=1143&bih=667&dpr=0.9
Also, Horse’s legs motions can be even more complicated: they have other patterns of motion, according to the type of walk/run the Horse does (e.g., Walk, Trot, Canter, Gallop).
Technically, it is as if the Horse’s back Legs, in relation to its Front legs (or vice-versa), could be treated as Secondary Actions (another fundamental Animation concept), each couple of Legs having their own, inner waking/running cycle; so you cannot just Key Frame the Back Legs at the same frame key Times of the Front Legs, because their synchrony does not work like that.
A very abstract example: as the Front Legs complete 1.0 entire running cycle, the Back Legs are just 0.5 (in the middle) of their own running cycle. So you need to work with ‘different Timings’ for the Front Legs in relation to the Back Legs; and all this must relate well enough between themselves and the rest of the Body.