I had a lot of "fun" getting the reins to work for this shot. They are done using an nCloth, but my computer really did not like me moving around the nCloth constraints. Actually rendering was about normal, but it was taking a very long time just to playblast.

I know we were specifically advised against doing human characters, but I couldn't help myself. Here I used a separate model for the face than I did for the wide shots, so I could actually get some detail. I separated out the eyebrows, eyelids, and lips into their own meshes so I could get the movement.

I was actually very satisfied with how the water turned out, even though it starts to get a little static-y in the actual movie. It is just a plane, given a reflective texture and a bump map to simulate the waves.

These trees and grass were each individual meshes. I used a MASH distribute in order to get a random placement of them within a confined area.

This actually ended up being one of my least favorite shots in the whole animation, but I wanted a place to talk about how I animated the horse. I used the auto rig feature in order to get a manipulable rig for both the cowboy and horse in the riding shots. There were some quirks with the horse, as the auto-rig is meant for human characters. One was that I couldn't just animate the "wrists" (front feet) and had to repeatedly go back and mess with the whole leg for the horse's shots.