HORSES
For Adobe After Effects
What is it?
The Horses template allows you to quickly and easily create custom horse animations in Adobe After Effects. Included are five lifelike horse puppets with a variety of coat colors.
With the easy-to-use controls, you can “program” your horses to do almost anything (keeping a profile-view). Assign any combination of the ten “primary actions” such as graze, gallop, or jump, and smoothly transition from action to action. Use the “secondary action” controls to animate the head, hooves, mouth, tail, ears, eyes, breathing and more. You can animate one horse, or create an entire herd, and insert it into your motion graphics or 3D scenes.
Create custom horse animations!
How It Works
These incredibly lifelike horses use the Advanced Puppet Pin tool in After Effects on high-resolution images to create the complex and realistic movements. With the easy-to-use controls, you can “program” your horses to do almost anything (keeping a profile-view). Assign any combination of the ten “primary actions”, such as graze, gallop, or jump, and smoothly transition from action to action. Use the “secondary action” controls to animate the head, hoof positions, mouth, tail, ears, eyes, breathing and more.
The preset movements, called “Primary Actions”, range from walking to galloping to rearing up. You can assign any combination of primary actions to a horse with a few clicks of a mouse. You control the timing and duration of actions, and you can smoothly transition from action to action. Each horse is on a single layer, so once you have chosen your primary actions, all you need to do is animate your horse layer’s position to move across the frame.
“Secondary Actions” offer even more control, allowing you to make custom movements of the hooves, head, tail, mouth, and more. Secondary actions have easy-to-use controls, so you can keyframe the different properties. Twitch the ears, blink the eyes, sniff the nose... even adjust the intensity and speed of the breathing. For animators who need even more control, the pins on the horse can always be adjusted manually.
This in-depth tutorial explains how the effect works, and shows how to animate and customize your horses in Adobe After Effects.
Need to Know
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This template uses After Effects’ new Advanced Puppet Pin tool, and is only compatible with Adobe After Effects version 16.0 (CC 2019) and up. Works on both Mac or PC. No plugins required.
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This template includes 5 adult horses, with Brown, Black, White, Dapple Gray, and Pinto coat colors.
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Each horse has 10 primary actions: Stand, Graze, Walk, Trot, Canter, Run (Gallop), Jump, Kick, Buck, Rear Up. You can assign your horse any number of primary actions, in any order, for any duration of time.
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The horses are created from 2D images. You can place the horses in your 3D scenes, but the horses are 2D (flat) and can only be seen from a profile (side view).
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At 100% scale, horses are approximately 3000 x 2200 pixels when standing.
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You can edit the original images to change the look of a horse, as long as your edits stay within the edges of the original horse shape. For example, you could overlay a war paint texture on a horse, but you could not add a saddle to a horse simply by adding the saddle to the horse image, since the saddle would be higher than the horse’s back, extending beyond the boundaries of the original shape. (A saddle could be composited onto the final moving horse, however).
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Horse bridle and reins (as seen to the right) are included. A saddle is not included.
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The unicorn horn from the demo video is included, but there is no full unicorn in the template. It is up to the user to motion track the horse’s head to attach the unicorn horn.
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Music and 3D scenes from the demo video are not included.
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This template has been "universalized", so it will work in After Effects running in any language.
The Horses template is not a plugin, so there is nothing to install. Rather, it's an Adobe After Effects project file, commonly known as a "template" because most of the work is already done and the user needs only to make their own customizations. This template is compatible with version CC 2019 (16.0) as well as all later versions of After Effects.
Horses contains copyrighted intellectual property. The animations you create with this product are 100% yours and can be used for commercial purposes, but the sharing or online posting of project files with or for anyone other than a client is prohibited. See the Terms and Conditions for more details.
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