Cartoon "Gypsy": Harness, lads, horses!
A few posts earlier we wrote about a new character - the horse Butse, whose appearance caused much controversy. Now it's time to revive him, give the opportunity to move, breathe deeply.
It all starts, naturally, with a simulation of a horse. Artist draws
front and side views, detail draws problem areas and transfers ready-made sketches to the modeler. Gradually, a new character appears, not only on paper, but also in three-dimensional space. Now it can be viewed from all sides, and not just the one that the artist painted. And now the model is ready, but this is only a small part of the work. Now you need to make the skeleton and control elements, that is, rig. The next stage is skinning, that is, the resulting system (rig) must be tied to the finished model, and thus our horse will be animated.
For two-legged characters, there are many developments that can be
adapt to any "human-like". For four-legged, too, there are some, but then they are some: the horse is “not in the tooth with the foot.” Therefore, we had to do the character riga setup completely independently, so to speak, from scratch.
')
A special feature was the long neck, which required a lot of time to make smooth movements of all vertebrae (especially the soft distribution of the influence of the bones in the lower part of the neck). The shoulder and scapular joints also move in a special way, because in our Bucephalus, unlike the two-legs, the front legs are legs. It means that they should be managed according to a different scheme. The tail tail turned out to be combined; one part of the bones was controlled manually, and the other was calculated by the computer. As a result, we got a completely universal rig, which fully meets our needs. Now our horse will be able to do everything that is required of him: to run, jump or even sneak. He can also climb a tree if the director wishes.
And all the preparations for the animation stage are ready, it remains only to put Butsu in the cart. And here we realized that such an important moment as a horse harness was missed, we had to again turn to artists, the guys developed a realistic, but not very heaped harness.
Having received a 3D model of the harness, the animators began to wrestle with how to attach it to the horse, because all the straps, though they repeat the movements of the horse, are at the same time separate objects. It was necessary to make sure that they not only moved almost synchronously with the horse's skin, but also slid and shifted depending on its movement. For this, we had to use the dynamics of the fabric described earlier.
Well, finally, everything is ready for animation. To begin with, it was decided to make a simple step. A step is the slowest type of horse movement. While walking, the horse consistently relies on each of the four legs, pushes off with the back foot, then the front right one goes, then the left rear leg and then the front left one, followed by the right rear leg, and so on in a cycle. A step is the least tedious type of movement of a horse, as well as the best way to show the power of thrust when moving, for example, a tent, in which the family of our main character lives. Moreover, Butsu first appeared in the cartoon just walking. For a realistic imitation of the horse’s gait, a huge amount of materials were studied: both drawings and videos taken from the Internet and filmed by us at the hippodrome.
And so our Butsa went and pulled the tent with the gypsy behind him. The first animation for the cartoon is ready, which reflects the interaction between characters and objects. In subsequent articles, we will describe how Bucephalus facial expressions will be made, and how he will have a real mane and tail ...
The site of the cartoon "Gypsy"
It all starts, naturally, with a simulation of a horse. Artist draws
front and side views, detail draws problem areas and transfers ready-made sketches to the modeler. Gradually, a new character appears, not only on paper, but also in three-dimensional space. Now it can be viewed from all sides, and not just the one that the artist painted. And now the model is ready, but this is only a small part of the work. Now you need to make the skeleton and control elements, that is, rig. The next stage is skinning, that is, the resulting system (rig) must be tied to the finished model, and thus our horse will be animated.
For two-legged characters, there are many developments that can be
adapt to any "human-like". For four-legged, too, there are some, but then they are some: the horse is “not in the tooth with the foot.” Therefore, we had to do the character riga setup completely independently, so to speak, from scratch.
')
A special feature was the long neck, which required a lot of time to make smooth movements of all vertebrae (especially the soft distribution of the influence of the bones in the lower part of the neck). The shoulder and scapular joints also move in a special way, because in our Bucephalus, unlike the two-legs, the front legs are legs. It means that they should be managed according to a different scheme. The tail tail turned out to be combined; one part of the bones was controlled manually, and the other was calculated by the computer. As a result, we got a completely universal rig, which fully meets our needs. Now our horse will be able to do everything that is required of him: to run, jump or even sneak. He can also climb a tree if the director wishes.
And all the preparations for the animation stage are ready, it remains only to put Butsu in the cart. And here we realized that such an important moment as a horse harness was missed, we had to again turn to artists, the guys developed a realistic, but not very heaped harness.
Having received a 3D model of the harness, the animators began to wrestle with how to attach it to the horse, because all the straps, though they repeat the movements of the horse, are at the same time separate objects. It was necessary to make sure that they not only moved almost synchronously with the horse's skin, but also slid and shifted depending on its movement. For this, we had to use the dynamics of the fabric described earlier.
Well, finally, everything is ready for animation. To begin with, it was decided to make a simple step. A step is the slowest type of horse movement. While walking, the horse consistently relies on each of the four legs, pushes off with the back foot, then the front right one goes, then the left rear leg and then the front left one, followed by the right rear leg, and so on in a cycle. A step is the least tedious type of movement of a horse, as well as the best way to show the power of thrust when moving, for example, a tent, in which the family of our main character lives. Moreover, Butsu first appeared in the cartoon just walking. For a realistic imitation of the horse’s gait, a huge amount of materials were studied: both drawings and videos taken from the Internet and filmed by us at the hippodrome.
And so our Butsa went and pulled the tent with the gypsy behind him. The first animation for the cartoon is ready, which reflects the interaction between characters and objects. In subsequent articles, we will describe how Bucephalus facial expressions will be made, and how he will have a real mane and tail ...
The site of the cartoon "Gypsy"
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/43621/
All Articles