Refining the gallop cycle

Using Flash this time (instead of Toon Boom) I re-did the gallop cycle by observing Spirit's gallop closer and looking to see what made the animation smooth yet fast. I noticed his head moved less compared to my zebra similarly with his back end which seems to extend and contract less than mine. Legs however, moved in a similar fashion so I can see the problem stems from the head and hind.

In this newer version I took the cycle rate from 12 to 10 pictures. The gallop is slightly faster in the updated version but this is because the original had more of a pause as the zebra is in the moment of suspension (all four feet off the ground). I think there's still more refining to be done, due to the back being too short but because my main focus for this was seeing how to make the head and hind move less, I'm not too worried about anatomical correctness.
I'm hoping the next test will be the final one however unlike a horse where their colour is consistent, a zebra has stripes so I think I'll need to look at what I'm going to call "stripe mechanics." This is because the stripes need to move in accordance with muscle movement and stripes will naturally extend and contract in relation to whether the muscle is in the extension or contraction phase. Again I'll have to deal with fixing jerky movement from the stripes as the first test did present some jitter. For now though the focus is on achieving the correct gallop.

 

Zebra Inspiration clips

 

 

 

Some might think animating an animal like this is easy as it's just a case of putting legs in the right place and the body will follow however I can say, and have the defence from the animation team at DreamWorks that created Spirit that horses are one of the most difficult animals to animate. If one leg or even a shoulder is placed slightly wrong in a frame, the whole movement is compromised. This can be seen in my test above that having the back slightly too short makes the horse look more like a dog.