Unit Seven & the Horse rearing

8th of March 2026

In this unit, we will investigate the principles of live action reference in animation, focusing on equine motion. We will get a better understanding of why authenticity plays a vital part in animation and how it can lend further depth to the narrative through lifelike motion. The observation of real-life movement is very important in understanding weight and balance.

The brief will introduce us to how to import and use liver action references in Maya Autodesk.

The rig I will use for this is the previously introduced Mothman TD Horse Rig. I am already familiar with the rig and find it easy to use. Its control curves are clear, and I managed to achieve nice motion in my previous animations.

Following our video tutorial, the first thing we will do is import a reference movie file into Maya. It is important that the file is a .mov file, not an MP4. I will copy and paste the file I found into the movies folder in the Maya project folder. Then I go to view > image plane > Import movie, and Maya imports the .mov file. I make sure that Image Planes are turned on in the Show menu under Viewport. This needs to be done in each window. I usually use plane > orthographic > side and perspective view.

The reference image I used can be found on Adobe Stock, and with a prescription, it can be downloaded. It was a bit of a challenge to use the .mov file in Maya, so I converted it to image sequences. I used Photoshop for this. Opened the .mov file, clicked File > Export > Render video. In the dropdown menu, I had to select Image Sequence and choose JPEG format.

The next step was to create a new project in the project window, import my horse rig and set the project. Once this was done, I created a free image plane (Create > Free Image Plane).

I scaled the image plane to suit the size of my rig, then went to the Attribute editor, where I clicked the little folder icon next to Image name. This folder took me straight to the project's source images folder, where I selected the first image. After this, I had to make sure to select Use Image Sequence, and this way, all the images were imported automatically.