Tips on rigging Horse

[DK]

Hi,
Trying to rig a horse so I can rotate it using smartbones but I am stuck with ideas for rigging the head and neck. If you rig a standard horse skeleton from the side the bone setup does not suit the characters body when it is rotated to the front. I'm thinking maybe I should rig all the elements seperately like an exploded bone offset rig? Any suggestions?

Thanks
D.K

[willf]

I'd say put it all on different layers.

I just finished something similar regarding a head and neck turn.



The head turn here is two separate bone layers and I alternate between them. One head starts out facing forward and rotates to almost 3/4 front, with the other head sitting at 3/4 front, which could easily be made to rotate to profile, but I didn't need it for the shot.

I found it was easier to have a separate bone layer for each head rather than to try and rig two head positions from just one smart bone.

Does ASP allow you to put layer reordering into smart bones now? I didn't have any trouble jumping from one head bone layer to the next, making each visible in turn, but if you can put reordering into a smart bone, that would save a lot of time. But the exploded offset rig would be my choice.

[DK]

That's great willf! Thanks for the sample that's exactly what I am trying to achieve. I will post the results of my rig when I get it done.

Cheers
D.K

[DK]

I did some playing around and came up with this as a solution. It seems to work quite well
and is very simple. Using only a rough wireframe as an outline guide, it uses a smart bone at
top of the head to raise/lower the head and the main head bone rotates the head from side
to side. There's a smartbone at the base of the neck that rotates the body.



AS file: http://www.creativetvandmedia.com/Forum ... dTest.anme

Cheers
D.K

[willf]

I forgot that you can of course add layer reordering to a smartbone by making the layer reordering part of an action first, then adding a smartbone to the action.

Selgin has a tutorial on how to remap an action onto a smartbone, so that you can go through the action by rotating the bone.