A personal project. I've always wanted to animate a horse, but wanted to work on rigging and skinning the upper body of a human. So a Centaur was the perfect fit.
Rigging
After studying various images of bone and muscle structures of horses, as well as videos of horses in motion, I created the bone structure for the horse part of the centaur. Having never rigged or skinned a horse before I went about creating the IK chains and controls for each leg and the horse body and skinning the mesh to these bones before even starting the human portion of the mesh. This allowed me to make sure I'd achieved the correct skin/ movements I desired.
I then moved onto the human part of the centaur and set up the initial bones, roll bones for the arms and controls, before skinning the mesh, taking a lot longer on the shoulders of the mesh than anywhere else to make sure I'd achieved the deformation I desired throughout all ranges of movement.
The bone structure of the Centaur rig, including the helpers and controls.
The centaur rig and skinned mesh, ready for animation.
Animation
With the mesh rigged, skinned and ready to animate, I referred back to the videos of horses in motion for reference on hoof movement patterns in a horse's different movement states; trotting, cantering and galloping. Using these I created cycles for each and transitions between, as well as a few miscellaneous animations.
The animated mesh, with a trot and canter cycle, transitions and a rearing animation.
