Horse Riding System Animations

Horse Riding Animations - Wilma Wiiand

For this project, I have been making animation for both horse and rider and implementing them into Unreal Engine. The animations have been done in Maya separately for the horse and rider and imported and synced together in Unreal through blueprints. The goal has been to make a whole locomotion set for a horse and rider and to create a small playable system with my animations!

Down below are some focused parts of the animations shown in the overview video above. Here you can see all the gaits, mounting and more in depth explanations of the project, enjoy!

The animations created for this project are:

For the horse: Walk, trot, canter, four different idles, mounting & jump.
For the rider: Riding in walk, trot canter, idle on horse, walk and idle animation on foot, mounting & jump.

Deep dive:

Working with the movement animations was a lot of fun. I used clear video references and with help of Sketchfab, could copy pose for pose to make the most believable horse animations. This is the second time ever animating a quadruped and first time animating a horse, and I really enjoyed the process!

The most challenging animations was the mounting and jumping, as both are quite dynamic and fluid motions were all the parts of the body are moving and rotating. For the mounting, the timing and realistic feeling of weight and flow required a lot of reiterating to get right.

Overall, my biggest hurdle was the implementation and technical side in Unreal Engine, to combine the animations of the horse and rider and to make the steering feeling right and looking smooth.

For enhancing the gameplay feeling when controlling the horse and character in the game, I created a blendspace with two additional versions of the horse's walk, trot and canter animation where he turns his head towards the direction the player is turning towards.

The blandspace calculates the rotation of the movement and bends the horse in that direction depending on how sharp of a turn you make.

Horse rig by Mothman-TD:
https://hombrepolilla.gumroad.com/l/horse_rig

Azri rig:
https://www.gameanim.com/product/azri-rig/

That is all for my Horse Animation System!

Thank you for reading,
Wilma Wiiand