cartoon-like horse animation

[Paul Hennell]

How many you need to draw depends a little on how fast you want the horse to move, and how exactly you want it to look. You could probably do a decent animation using just one or two pictures, splitting each limb onto a different animated layer and animating with key-frames & the puppet tool.

Not sure how the transition might work from that but it’s probably a good start.

Also, while there’s like better resources out there somewhere the idea of animating a horse made me instantly think of these famous photos. Might prove useful.

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[Jon Geddes]

For the morph, you can use the Reshape Effect. So if you break the horse up into layers, placing the anchor point at the joints, and animating it, you can then use the reshape effect on each layer, transforming the horse’s back leg into the person’s leg, the horse’s front leg into the person’s arm, the horse’s body into the person’s body, etc….

As for the bicycle, you can have it on a layer of it’s own, and have it scale up from 0 to 100 out of the chest of the horse during the morph.

It will take many many hours of tweaking to make it look good, probably at least twice as long as you think it will take.

Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com

[Mike Roberts]

Animating the horse is easy using a combination of jointed puppet (spilt the legs into their basic parts – upper, lower, ankle and hoof) and hinge the legs at their joints… then do the head, then rider

should be simple based on those muybridge photos…

the big thing to make the morph not looks stupid is have the horse morph cleverly into the bicycle… I’l make the legs of the horse come together and morph into the forks of the bike, have the wheels grow from the ankles or roll down the legs to the ends of the forks. don’t randomly morph one shape into the other…

Another sneaky trick is just to scale the horse into a 2-3 frame squash, then pop it up over 1 frame, then recover having swapped the horse for the bike. That’s a lot less work…

[Tielman Dewaele]

Ok guys, thanks for the tips!
The horse riding shouldn’t be that hard.
I’m not sure about the morph. But ill be here again, when i’m stuck.

Mike:
Can you explain that technique more clearly? I don’t realy understand it…(my englsih isn’t tip top)

Another sneaky trick is just to scale the horse into a 2-3 frame squash, then pop it up over 1 frame, then recover having swapped the horse for the bike. That’s a lot less work…

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[Mike Roberts]

i’ll see if i can find an animated example later, but basically, it’s a squash and stretch popping transformation…

you scale your horse of equal size to the bike down over 3-5 frames from 100% x 100% to, say 70% x 130% so it’s squashed wide and flat… Then in 1-2 frames you go to 130% x 70% so it’s tall and thin, then swap in the bike at the 2nd frame, then make squash back down to 80 x 120 over 3 frames, then up to 110 x 90 over 3 frames, then down to 95 x 105 over 3 frames then back to 100%. Think of it like pulling a jelly mold, stretching it up, then as you let go, it’s replaced by another jelly and it squashes down bobbing up and down…

I hope that’s not to confusing.

It’s a very cartoony effect, and might not suit your needs, but it’s a good thing to have in your arsenal

[Tielman Dewaele]

Ok i think i understand.
But you can send me the example if you have the time…

T

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[Mike Roberts]

Here’s what I meant…

i threw this together…