Gallop cycle

Gallop is tricky. At least for me. So I need to use Video Reference.
Here is the link to the YouTube video.
I recorded it from the screen using CamStudio.                                          
Click here:
Using Windows Movie Maker I selected a cycle and cut 6 of them together:
Click here
Using SnippingTool I made snap shots, trying to find Extremes, Breakdowns and In-betweens:

                                             Stretched (extreme).

                                             Passing position (front)

                                            Air born (Extreme)

                                             Passing positon (back)

                                             In-between (back)

                                             Back to beginning

Using Windows Movie Maker, I made them back into a short movie:
Click here
Works. OK, now I can try to repeat those poses in Maya.

Something like above. Red lines show that front Left and rear Right legs are almost parallel.

Select all the controls in Quick Select Sets (in Outliner).
I'll choose the range of 16 frames, because it's easy to divide. But the real Gallop will take probably 12 or 14 frames. So our will appear slow and heavy, but I'll go for it for the ease of dividing (16/8/4/2).
Let's make our first position and set the keys on frames 0 and 16.

Red rectangle is Quick Select Sets, Yellow is autoTangent and Purple ovals - our Extremes.

Now we need to create an Air born position, as the most important for the Gallop. Actually we could have started with it.

pic1.

pic2.

Red angle is the shape I'd give to the overall pose. Pay attention to the flattening of the tangents. Compare pic1 and pic2.

Now I'd attempt a Breakdown for the front legs. 

Seems like a mess, but look carefully. Follow the movement of red and blue outlines (with corresponding arrows). Chest I left as is, but the butt goes up.

Continue with another Passing position, of the Rear legs. The chest goes up, butt goes down a little.

Select the curves and click on the button in Red rectangle to curves into Stepped. This will give us better understanding of what's going on in Playblast.
Click here

Not bad. Now we need to take care of the in-betweens. Poses, where both legs are on the ground, "pushing" it from underneath and where "ups" and "downs" of the body are.

Red Arrows show that both hooves are on the ground. Chest goes down. Right shoulder is broken. It can be fixed either by moving the shoulder or by using Toe Roll. Like in the picture below.

At this point, after learning to do walk and trot, we should know where to place in-betweens. If this is still problematic, please refer to walk cycle , quadruped trot posts and go over them again.

Our main problem now is to compare the strides of all the legs and make sure they are 

1. straight lines, and 

2. of the same length.

Red Arrow points at the foot. Red rectangles are the section of the Translate Z, which supposed to be straight. Red circle is the button to make tangents straight.

Red lines are the straight sections of the forward/backward translation of the hooves (on the ground) after some adjustments. Now we need to compare front and back feet.

 Above are Translates Z of all 4 feet. Red sections show adjusted straight segments.

After adjustments of all the up/down curves for each leg, Toe Roll curves for each leg, Chest and hips up/down curves, chest goes up - head goes down - playblast looks like this:

Still looks funky.
 So after some tweaking and moving keys here and there, offsetting back from the front, adding tail animation, neck/head counter animation I came up with this:

And finally, here's how my Timeline looks now. 

All the offsets and in-betweens created complicated picture with keys resulting in every frame. At this point it becomes near to impossible to add changes to this cycle. So please try to keep your timeline clean as long as you can before it becomes as muddy as one below.

The End.