warning: rant (not about anything serious)

[gryphonqueen13]

(Dislclaimer: As far as I know, there is nothing anyone working on this server can do about this. I'm pretty sure it's something Blizzard has to do which, if it gets done, will hopefully eventually trickle down to us as we update. So I'm not directing this at anyone here, because I know there's nothing you can do about. I just wanted to see if anyone else has noticed/ is bothered by it.)

There's this little issue in WoW that's been bugging me since forever. The horse animations. Once upon a time, they were even worse than they are now. The walk animation was actually a mangled slow trot (the legs moved in diagonal pairs, but there was no period of suspension). Thankfully that has been fixed, at least. Now the walk looks pretty darn good, I think.

The problem for me is the horrific 'gallop.' It looks like a series of small jumps. It looks more like a dog or cat would run, if even that. There's nothing equine about it at all. Honestly it reminds me of the antique drawing of horses from before people actually studied horse gaits with photography. Ehm, it's hard to explain. My poor little horse bounds along like a gazelle... his front and hind legs move in pairs, not in an even succession like they should. There is way too much 'butt-wiggle.'

What really gets my undies in a twist about this is that it would be so easy to fix! The death knight horses have an completely different gallop- one that is absolutely gorgeous by comparison. All it would take is switching all the horse models to the DK mount's gallop animation.

Please, Blizzard gods! I beg you! Let my horse run like a horse!

Oh, and the horses are way too big for the riders. When I'm mounted, it looks like if I were to stand next to my horse, I would only come up to his shoulder. Oh, and the riders always sit way too far back.... *digresses into technical equestrian nonsense*

/end rant

Just out of curiosity, has anyone else noticed this? Does it mess with your head as much as it does mine? Or am I just being a nitpicky horse nerd?

[Cressy]

Actually, I have.

And that is the reason none of my characters ride horses!

I mean none. Zero. Zip. Nadda.

[Hawk]

Heh, I've never been too bothered about the mount models, though I will note a couple of things that irk me aswell!

- The way the horse randomly does that step backwards thing after a jump. Not sure if that's what they do, but I've never seen it IRL. Then again I rarely see horses jump and land IRL but it still irks me.
- The saber's shoulderblades, when walking, are really exaggerated.

That's about it really.

[Shivali]

The horse animation for jumping backwards makes no sense at all. It's the exact same one for it jumping forwards. In fact, how many horses have you seen jumping backwards? I don't think they can do that.

[Nostra]

When undead death knights sits on their mounts they´re kinda behind/in the saddle for some reason.

That struck me as odd when I was playing retail.

As seen here.

Spoiler:

[Theik]

When undead death knights sits on their mounts they´re kinda behind/in the saddle for some reason.

That struck me as odd when I was playing retail.

As seen here.

Spoiler:

You think that is odd? Try this:

[Touchseed]

Lol, its a game, maybe they'll make a patch to fix the horse animations. Maybe once they do that they can make the flail item look like a real flail with a chain and maybe they'll force cows off of others mounts again. AAANYways, Blizzards getting most of their money from this game from people who don't give a crap about realism in this game, but if its any consolation: Alot of the game doesnt make sense to me.

[Painkillah]

I'm playing both animations right now in Model Viewer and the difference ain't that great.

What you do see as "difference" is the model and the way it's animated due to the different mesh and also the different set of bones. Fixing it ain't that easy, it's not a simple task of copying and pasting from one to the other. They would have to export the bones from the DK horse, then import them on the regular model and tweak the smooth skin settings a lot, basically rebuilding the weights for each bone segment (how much it affects the model in said area).

Either that or rebuild the horse model from scratch and make it as close as possible to the DK horse model. In this case the skeleton would match it (more or less) and little further editing would be required. It's a simple copy and paste (in this case export and import) of the skeleton and the weights on the mesh acting as skin.

Trust me though, neither is easy.

[gryphonqueen13]

That sounds reasonable, Painkillah, except for the fact that the non-rideable horses in the game (which, as far as I can tell, use the same exact model as the mount version, minus the saddle) display the more realistic gallop in model viewer.

Now I'm stumped. I can't figure out why they would change the one animation and not the other. I could see the type of difficulty Pain is talking about with applying this animation to something like the Forsaken mount. But when one version of human horse runs this way and the other version runs differently, my brain starts to twist.

I made a little video, if anyone is interested to see what I'm talking about. I know the quality is awful. Apparently this computer can't handle fraps.

Oops, WMV files aren't allowed. I don't have a youtube account either. You'll just have to take my word for it.


Anyway, I know this is entirely inconsequential. As far as I care the topic can die. I just wanted to add this little bit. It's quite an odd thing, it seems.

[Painkillah]

Oh! Dumb me.
I was comparing the unsaddled (unridable in-game) horses with the DK mount. And I was wondering what the hell are you seeing so different cause I didn't see anything. Only now I fully realised what you meant.

Take a look at the screenshots below:
- DK Mount at frame 0 vs Unsaddled Horse at frame 0
(So yeah, you're pretty much right. Both share a nice running animation. Although bone structure is quite different.)
- Ridable Horse Mount at frame 265 (Roughly the same position of the running animation. Can't tell for sure since they're oh so different.)

Bone structure seems roughly similar between the saddled and unsaddled horses. Aside from those two joints that seem to have no purpose (between the front and back legs). So you're right. They pretty much have no reason not to copy the animation from the unsaddled mount and use it on the saddled one. Sorry 'bout that. I misunderstood. ^^

Gotta say cheers for both the animations though. It's really hard to make 'em. You should have seen -my- attempt. Now that was a horse running like a gazelle. xD

[Maxwell]

I never noticed that until it was brought up, and now I can't help but not notice it.

[gryphonqueen13]

Gotta say cheers for both the animations though. It's really hard to make 'em. You should have seen -my- attempt. Now that was a horse running like a gazelle. xD

True, I remember hearing somewhere that horses are one of the most difficult animals to animate well, whether it's in movies, video games, whatever. What do you use to make your own animations? I've never heard of such a thing but it sounds like fun...

[Painkillah]

Uh, I use "Maya". It's one of the places where I stole the name for my main character. xD
Take a look at this short video here: Project Overview of Animating Quadrupeds in Maya.
Indeed they are hard but like everything, it takes time and training. ^^