After having practiced head turns and blinks, my next task was to tackle a weight shift. This would incorporate a lot of what I learned from doing those previous few exercises.

Weight shifts happen all the time in more complex body mechanics shots. So it was really key that I figured out how the body deals with its own balance and weight before I tried anything more complicated. I’m pretty happy with the final product here. Once I established the primary movement of the body, I had a great time adding in all the secondary motion. This included things like; Blinks, the hair, the arms, and some eye darts. The subtle movement of the character’s right foot is one of my favorite little details.

But before I animated this using Gabriel Salas’ fantastic Sam Rig, I created a little proxy mesh using simple primitives. My main focus was on figuring out how the hips and chest should move. With this in mind, the proxy mesh consisted of those two features plus some feet and legs to ground it. I also extruded some simple boxes from each side of the chest and hip meshes. These allowed me to quickly visually track their orientation.

For the first pose, I decided on positioning the character in a contrapposto pose. This essentially means having their weight on one leg AND having the hips and chest tilted at contrasting angles. For the second pose, I’d do a similar thing but flipped. The weight would shift to the opposite leg and the hips and chest would tilt at opposite-yet-still-contrasting angles.

Using the proxy mesh here really helped me keep track of the arcs of both the hips and chest. Plus I was able to pretty quickly experiment with delaying/offsetting their movement too. The hips “lead” the movement here while the chest follows closely behind. There’s also quite a bit of follow through and overlap here as the character finally comes to a place of rest. I’ve written more about those principles my post about animating a tail!

Sam Rig by Gabriel Salas
Proxy “Rig” by Me?

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