Help needed with bone rigging

[HappyCat]

Hi all...

I have created a horse. I want to make it move.
Have set up the bones with flexi binding, smart bones and some smart bone dials.
However...

I have been trying to get this to work for over a day now and I am getting frustrated.

Here is what I have been doing.
I have the horse's legs in their own layers. There are 4 bones to each leg.
I have named the upper bone and have made that into a smart bone with its own action,
Several things go wrong. The movement looks smooth in the action I have set up.
However, when I want to try it out in the mainline, not only are some movements impossible, others perform with a strong shake, as if the horse has twitches. I do not understand why this is happening.

A horse has 3 main gaits: walk, trot and cantor. Although the initial movements of the leg is the same for all, the leg stretches out more or gets pulled up more depending on the gaits. Do I set up all possible movements for all gaits in the same action? In other words, any layer with movement: should it have an action per type of movement, or are all varieties of a movements set up in the same action.

When I am setting up the action, there is something else that stumps me.
Before I start the bone manipulation, do I normally add a keyframe for the starting position?

Somewhere in a tutorial they say that it is imperative to have a keyframe for each bone. How do I do this? The tutorial is not clear on this.

Lots of questions.... I am looking forward to lots of answers!

Thanks...

[HappyCat]

Here is another puzzle:
I have removed all actions. I have removed all visible keyframes. Yet, when I move from frame 0 to frame 1 there is a slight change in the drawing. How does this happen with no visible change made by me anywhere, in terms of animation?

[dkwroot]

Here is another puzzle:
I have removed all actions. I have removed all visible keyframes. Yet, when I move from frame 0 to frame 1 there is a slight change in the drawing. How does this happen with no visible change made by me anywhere, in terms of animation?

This happens when you use target bones. Basically the bones 'snap' into position when you start frame 1 and that causes the slightly change you see.

As for rigging, it's usually best practice to make sure the limbs of your character move fluidly. This means that you'll want to spend your time making sure all the body parts bend correctly and everything is moving as it should.

After you have limbs and body parts bending like they should, you'll want to create an action for each animation. So you'll have a walk action, a trot action and a cantor action. You could even throw in a jump action and whatever else you think you might need to use redundantly.

[synthsin75]

Twitching is usually due to not having enough frames in the SB action for the motion to interpolate smoothly.

[dueyftw]

A horse has 3 main gaits: walk, trot and cantor. Although the initial movements of the leg is the same for all, the leg stretches out more or gets pulled up more depending on the gaits. Do I set up all possible movements for all gaits in the same action? In other words, any layer with movement: should it have an action per type of movement, or are all varieties of a movements set up in the same action.

You going to apply actions to the bone layer 'legs'

Each action should have another action to stop the action and come to a neutral point. What I mean is the legs should be in the same spot where they started. So now you have all 3 gaits but you have to stop on gate to go to the other.

Next would be the transitions: Because walk goes to trot then to cantor and back down to walk. I would have I action that would take the mid point of a walk and make it into the trot. Then at the mid point of the trot I would have an action that goes to the cantor.

So all the actions if split in half '+' for starting and '-' ending

'+walk'(horse start to walk and repeats) '-walk'( ends horse walk) with a mid point action '+transition walk to trot' and '-transition trot to walk'

'+trot' and -trot +transition trot to cantor -transition cantor to trot

+cantor and -cantor

Confused? Sorry, It's the best I can do.

Dale