Autodesk is galloping ahead with its inclusion of AI tools in its main software Maya and 3ds Max, but it's the new AI horse animation tool in MotionMaker (in Maya) that caught the eye. Four-legged animals are notoriously hard to get right, so adding an AI tool to make one of animation’s trickiest challenges easier feels like something everyone can like. While some may still see this as a Trojan horse 2.0, making us more dependent on AI, it’s hard to turn down something that makes a notoriously hard process easier.
The new tool not only creates basic animations for trots and gallops but also generates transitions between them. Usually, getting a natural, rhythmic transition from trot to canter, for example, can take hours of tweaking. MotionMaker’s new AI tool follows on from ideas announced at AU 2025 and is designed to remove that hurdle (sorry) as the animals trot from stable diffusion (really, sorry) and into the wilds of your new projects.
