Creating a Horse rig in Cascadeur

in this tutorial we will go over how to set up a rig for a horse in gas cutter so you can animate it and use the built-in physics tools to add more life to your animation and to make it physically accurate this horse model is from blender kit and why the Armature is not perfect I think it looks very good I made a few modifications since originally there were no bones for the Tails so I added a simple bone chain that is parented to the pelvis and I also created a low poly version of the tail because the original one has a bunch of vertices and in my experience Cascada can struggle a bit with high poly models after importing the model to Cascada we can immediately go to rigging mode and since currently quickly into a dozen support rigging quadrupaths we will need to create the rig manually creating a rig should start from the first joint in the hierarchy usually it is the pelvis bone as it is in this case as well the spine consists of multiple joints but I don't want to create rigid bodies for each each one separately since the horse spine is not that flexible I think three or four digit but it should be enough I will first select the pelvis then the joint that I want a rigid body to end so I will Skip One joint and select the third one and now if I add the regular element it will contain the first two joints of the spine but the additional Point controller should be placed on the top and not on the side in order to tear the hip correctly so I will undo my last step and select the correct axis where I want the point controller you could use Global y-axis but in my case I will check which local axis is pointing in the correct direction and set that one and now the point controller is at its correct position now for the rest of the spine it's pretty much the same process I will select the next joint then the end joint and create a new regular element if the point controller is placed on the opposite side you can move them with the manipulators same for the neck I will create one rigid body for two joints in my case then for the head I will select the head joint and one of the child of the head that is in the middle and I will move the point to the nose so the rigid body is aligned with the head and the additional Point controller I will move to the top of the head to be able to add secondary motion without a physics tool I will add rigid bodies to the tail as well and I will again use two joints for each rated bodies if you have been using the global axis for the additional Point controllers until now you may want to switch to local here especially if your tail is curling down as it is in this case while you could quickly create rigid bodies for all of the joints by selecting every one of them and checking multiple create I prefer to have fewer controllers and I will add spline ik to ensure that the tail deformation remains smooth splaniki makes the joints between two point controllers follow a spline instead of a straight line creating it can be a bit tricky you need to select the main and the direct action point controllers from the beginning to the end and then select every joint in between to select the joints it's easier to switch to Joint mode view but don't forget to keep the shift key pressed to select everything when everything is selected click the add spline button under the main actions since wiring is symmetrical I only need to raise one side of the horse I will start with the back leg by creating rigid bodies for each joint here the additional Point controller should point to the side since the joint mainly rotates around this axis once he joined has a real amount I can set up the hinge action hold down shift and select two additional points where the limb should bend under injection click Union to hinge this way the two points will be joined and you can see that the port Target appears on the correct side you can adjust the distance of this water get already like and I will also add the additional Point controller of the next joint to this connection the front leg is pretty much the same I created three elements for each joint and edit injection for the top joint in this case the poor Target is pointing backwards which if you check how horse legs band is the correct direction for the rigid body of the feet or hoof you can set collision with the ground in my case the last joint ends on the ground level which is not desirable so I will move the last Point controllers above ground you can check the global position of this point in the transform properties just make sure that the Y coordinates are positive this is how the rigid bodies I will need but I will also add the Box controllers for the parts of the body that don't significantly affect physics I will only add box controllers for the mouth nose and ears you can also scale up this controllers to create actual boxes rather than just rectangles while it's possible to add more box controllers for the stomach area I wasn't planning to animate this part so I'm finished creating the requirements before measuring the limbs I will set the correct size of the rigid bodies so they are around the same size as the mesh I also set the weight of each rigid body I couldn't find any detailed info about this so I checked that the horse should wait around 400 to 800 kilos and with the help of chechi PT and my rough estimation I came up with these values that you can see right now feel free to copy it but I'm sure these are not accurate and I will go to each box controller and ResCare them so they will be selectable easily in box controller mode you have better control than scaling if you switch to local mode and now I can set up the mirror plane select the ring Elements which I want to mirror and set the correct suffix and create the mirrored objects and that's basically all we had to do so after generating the rig we can begin animating keep in mind that auto pausing is only available for humanoid characters and will not work with this kind of tricks however you can still use physics tools like Auto physics to add secondary motion to your animation if you want to learn more about rigging check out the official documentation and the tutorials on cascader's website I will leave some useful links down below and if you have any further questions feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to help

Channel: Aron Nemeth

Views: 20,653

Keywords: cascadeur rigging, horse rigging tutorial, quadrupet rigging tutorial, cascadeur animal rig

Id: 0i2Aho6w1_Y

Length: 6min 29sec (389 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023