Another “tried and true” animation exercise is having a character pick up a heavy object. Up until this point, I’d had plenty of practice with characters interacting with objects, but it was mostly small stuff (a ball, a juice box, a hammer, etc). So giving a character something a bit clunkier to deal with was a nice challenge. Since weight and gravity aren’t really a simulated thing in an animation program like Maya, you have to fake it to make the motion feel realistic. Ensuring the character moves and reacts properly to the weight can be a little tricky. You really have to lean into your understanding of anticipation, timing, and spacing to communicate how heavy the object might be. For this exercise, which I animated back in 2021, I had the character lift and swing a heavy box from one table to another. But I also wanted to throw in a few other animation concepts to make things even more needlessly complicated! Hooray! Here’s the motion:

On top of practicing weight, I wanted to revisit the walk cycle too! So I had Dana briefly walk into the scene to try to animate a walk outside of the cycle I had practiced before. Transitioning out of a walk cycle and into a standing pose ended up being a little more difficult than I thought it would be! The timing and spacing is typically pretty consistent in a repeating cycle. But having her come to a stop meant I had to account for how the different body parts would independently slow down and ease into the next motion. Filming my own reference footage really came in handy here!

I’ve had a lot of animations in which a character reacts to or interacts with an object. But what about interacting with another character!? A lot of animation and acting in general has people interacting and reacting with each other. It’s a storytelling essential! And so I included a little reaction animation at the end to give this a try. Healthbot pops up out of the box and Dana reacts. Nothing too complicated, but it’s a start!

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how this animation turned out. There’s quite a few things I’d change about the exaggeration and the posing, but I have to remember that I made this back in 2021. At the time I was still experimenting with workflow and struggling a bit with the splining process. So not bad for the time!

If you’d like to see earlier versions of this animation, check out this SyncSketch link. There you can see a few different iterations of this motion and feedback I received along the way. I owe a huge thanks to SyncSketch users Ro**, Henri Harrison, and Kaitolao for their extremely helpful notes.

Anyway, thanks so much for reading! Next up we’re tackling animating a laugh, so look out for that post in the coming weeks!

Dana Rig by Gabriel Salas

Healthbot Rig by Raphael Can

My Links: ArtStation / Instagram / Vimeo / YouTube