[h2]How We Approach Horse Animations[/h2]
It’s no secret: horses are really hard to animate. Their movement is quite special because they have practically no muscles in their lower legs! It’s all just a system of spring and release through the tendons and joints. Wonky horse anatomy is everywhere from medieval drawings to modern animated TV and even video games!
Horses: enamouring and stumping artists since time immorial!For our game, horses are obviously the star of the show, so we want to do better than
that. While working on horse animation for our game’s cutscenes, we realized that hand keying all of our animations was simply unsustainable. It required SO much time and polish from our experienced, senior animators to get right.
That's why we partnered up with
Rune Entertainment in Canada to set up a motion capture studio directly on location in a barn. This minimized our horse actor’s stress and gave us a lot of time to record valuable data to assist in animation!
What motion capture isn’t all that well suited for though is the basic gait animations for our horses’ movements. These animations need to run in a smooth, continuous loop, so the slightest real life irregularity or asymmetry would become noticeable very quickly. That's why we hand key the important cycles for walk, trot, canter and gallop.
[h2]Getting Better and Better with Iterative Design[/h2]
An example of Muybridge’s reference photo series turned into an animated sequence!To make sure that these hand-made animations would also be able to hold up to the scrutiny of horse-loving gamers, we’ve consulted with
Alice Ruppert from The Mane Quest, to help us find and fix issues in our horses’ movements. While we won’t reach the same quality AAA studios achieve, we’re very proud of our small and scrappy team’s work. In this blog, we wanted to share our process and show how we improve the look and feel of our horse animations over time with each iteration round.
On the left are older canter animations; on the right are updated versions.First we break things down and look at an entire animation sequence frame by frame. By comparing what we have against real-life references, such as the images recorded by Eadweard Muybridge, we noticed instances of impossible leg positions and poses that were contributing to an overall subpar look for the whole motion. For example, this helped us identify and correct moments where the horse’s knees weren’t properly locked when carrying weight, or moments where the legs didn’t stretch out far enough when reaching forward.
And now with galloping! What do you think, can you see some improvements?On the left are the older animations that you’ve seen in our announcement trailer and our earlier social media posts. On the right, you can see an updated version of the same animations after making changes to various poses and leg behaviors.
[h2]Listening, Learning, and Always Improving[/h2]
We love that our community is so passionate and interested in this level of detail. We’re combing through all of your comments on social media to see what feedback we can adapt and which suggestions we should consider for future iterations! We have a lot of work scheduled for the Early Access release and its planned updates after that, but we’re always happy to receive more feedback for improvements to the horse and rider animation as well.
Our game is coming to
Early Access on May 8th - soon you’ll be able to take the reins and begin your adventure on Alderwood Island. Thanks for all of the support and see you soon in the next dev blog! Let us know if there's any exciting topics you'd like us to cover next. 😊
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3258290/Equinox_Homecoming/
Name Disclaimer: Moving forward, while naming their character during character creation, all players will see a warning message explaining that names cannot be edited and to avoid revealing information.
Group Invites: We identified and addressed a crash that occurred when players sent out Group invites.
