Animating HEAVY Weight (Objects, Punches, Throwing)

I'd like to give you a formula to creating weight in your animation now it's not going to work for every single shot this is more going to apply to characters lifting objects throwing objects interacting with things and it comes down to two factors how heavy is the object in question and how strong is our character that's sort of the focus of what this formula is to demonstrate this and to show you where I came up with this formula we're going to observe god of war for those who haven't played it yet God of War is a magnificent game and from the beginning as I played this game one of the things that I noticed is just how powerful Kratos felt if you haven't played God of War yet that's your homework get on it now I've played a lot of video games I'm very proud of my video game collection it is extensive but one thing that has never really captivated me is having a character open a chest it's something that I've noticed from game to game changes depending on the animation style and the character strength and all these different things and certain chests take a little bit more or less effort to actually get them open and it was never really something I noticed until I was playing God of War and katos just punches through the top of a chest and I thought well that's that's different that's interesting I wasn't expecting it and it was just kind of cool but it got me paying attention to the way he interacted with the world and as he continued to open up more chests I was struck by just how cool it was every time you get to a chest how satisfying it was when he just grabs it and just breaks it open it never just felt like he was opening a box he was always unsealing some tomb or breaking open some Stone coffin it was always really aggressive but really impressive animation wise and as I'm running around playing this game I'm starting to just pay attention to all these little things I'm starting to wonder how did does it feel so heavy when he's also so strong that was the thing that always caught my attention is he's supposed to be ridiculously strong so the fact that it looks like he's expending some effort to open these things should make me question how strong he is but it doesn't it only reinforces my understanding of him as this Powerhouse which is where this whole thing starts to come together you can't fully reveal a character's strength until you demonstrate what they're up against the thing I noticed the most about every time a chest got opened was that before it just got flung open with all the power of a god it was first pulled and struggled against with various amounts of intensity sometimes he'd grab it from the bottom and his elbows would shake from the effort or maybe he'd push against the top and it just wouldn't budge for a second the thing is he had to earn it and once he did it broke loose and went flying and you can see this all over the place if we look at something entirely different we can look at Encanto and we can look at Louisa in the surface pressure song as they go into this little funnel thing she pushes against the edges it bows and then breaks open we have that moment of struggle before it explodes Mr Incredible is going to do the same thing we have all these different examples of strong characters who have to first show us the weight of the object that they're actually trying to move before we can see them demonstrate their strength over it and this doesn't always have to be Superhero level strength your average character or your average person is going to go through the exact same thing come here oh this is Luna and she wants you all to know that we're doing a body mechanics class in April and if you watch this video after April 1st know that that class will exist online and a bunch of other classes that I'm doing will continue to exist as well body mechanics Advanced body mechanics facial acting lip sync Unreal Engine Maya blender we're doing a ton of stuff link below to all those classes if I pick up an object that's really light I'm not going to struggle at all I'm just going to grab it I'm going to lift it because the object's not that heavy however if an object is really heavy it's going to cause some amount of delay and I have to accelerate it into motion from rest that break in the flow that delay in the motion is what shows us the weight of the object so that's the first part of the formula you need to show us how heavy the object is obviously the heavier things are going to have more resistance they're going to be harder to move and they're going to take longer to actually get going that's why when you have Godzilla and Pacific Rim and these giant things in our scenes they usually move slower but they have a lot of force and momentum built into their movements Big Hero 6 does a really good job of showing this because you get the sense of these really big heavy characters because of the way they animate things with that kind of slower inertia until they cut to the little small robots and they move much quicker that difference of slow versus fast is the difference of heavy versus light at least in most styles of Animation but now we get to part two of our formula how strong is your character because the stronger your character the quicker they're going to begin to overcome the weight of the object and the more exaggerated their effect on that object will be so let me give you an example now if you were going to do video reference and you wanted a heavy object you should use a heavy object I'm going to have to pretend here which is not going to be nearly as convincing as if I actually had like a medicine ball but bear with me if I'm able to just pick him up he seems pretty light but if I have to kind of take a second to lift him up again I'm I'm trying my best here it should have seemed like he was heavier and that's step one you got that already but once we have the character in hand a stronger weak character is going to have a different experience throwing him if we have a weak character holding a heavy object and they want to throw it they will be able to overcome it in this particular case but they're not just going to Chuck it it's going to be a slower process of overcoming the weight and maybe not to very large effect so we can have this because its weight is so hard to push we over come it but to what extent and how quickly right if we have a normal character who has this object they can just throw it but if we have a really strong character even if this object was really heavy we've already established the weight you can have the character do all the same stuff and how quickly they can overcome it take out some frames here's what we get weak normal [Music] strong now I'm no baseball star but hopefully you get the idea here that the stronger character is able to not only move their arm faster but it creates a larger spacing through that speed that pretty much guarantees this object is going to then take off at a much higher velocity and therefore go much farther what's nice is you can combine this even in the throw so it's not just about lifting the object it's also about throwing the object when we go from this position and we go into the anticipation and we start to push this is an opportunity to drag this back to show its weight if it just moves with the hand all the time it's not that heavy but if it's heavy enough that the body can move and has to pull it we have to start to get all these other things the neck pushing the arm shoulder pulling back everything has to sort of push it forward from behind it gives us an opportunity to show the character overcoming it based on all those things and with that drag however many frames we have in between that and the full extension that's the answer that's what your determining of like how easy how quick are they ever like that's that's where you're answering that question hello hi now I'm going to show you an example of some good animation that in my opinion doesn't convey the weight in the way that I think it could where God of War shows us that delay before the inevitable whoosh of power and kto sometimes has shots where we have that same effect like the one I mentioned earlier but there are other times where we skip a part of the formula and I think the shot is not as strong as it could be as a result what do you notice about this shot from the same sequences before Louis is able to just grab this Rock Palm it in her hand lift it up and Chuck it into the geyser thing and move on from there we know she's super strong and if you don't have the frames to do what I'm trying to suggest we do here sound effects camera Shake there are actually a lot of other tools that we can use to try to bolster the weight of an object also effects and dust simulation that kind of stuff there's a lot of things you can do to help but in this case she just kind of grabs it and lifts it there's no moment to see how heavy that object was this could have been made out of Styrofoam for all we know to me it looks like it's made out of Styrofoam we know it's heavy because it's a giant boulder and the surfacing work is great the pose is good like all the pieces are there but we just never see her have to struggle to lift it even if it's not hard for her to lift it it's just a matter of it needs to be lifted it needs to have that moment of weight to show us the stakes to show us what the character is actually overcoming with her strength and how would you do that by doing the stuff they did in lots of the shots using all the different parts of her body to push First with her back with her shoulders with her arms to allow that Force to ripple from the core outwards my whole baseball example here of you know having to pull with the neck and everything else you can look at Street Fighter and you'll see that same kind of thing in the different poses you can look in Arcane and you'll see that every time a character throws a really powerful punch they're leaning into it with their body you're getting that feeling of drag in the back of the hand or whatever part of the body we're talking about here and that's creating a weight that once it quickly snaps into place and gives us this amazing pose it gives us that power and if we're look for that power we can't have too many frames in between pose a and pose B another wonderful trick that we can actually look at enconto for another thing I really like is when we have these giant rocks falling on the characters they're even intersecting the geometry the rocks are actually passing through each other and scaling scale is just like translate rotate you can use scale to do stuff a lot of people tend to forget that for some reason but you can scale stuff you can intersect geometry when it suits you these are Big solid rocks but it creates the feeling of compression the feeling of weight as they all pile on and there's amazing body mechanics and acting choices of having the elbow and the arm recorded for you to come back to later my group mentorship is linked down below as well so if you want to know how to do something I will show you and I'll record it and you'll have access to those recordings going forward anyways thanks so much for watching I'm sir Wade I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 21,800

Keywords: heavy, animation, pose to pose, how to animate weight, animating weight, weight animation, animating lifting, animate heavy, animate heavy object, how to animate, lifting heavy object, box open, opening chest, god of war animation, arcane animation, how to animate a punch, how to animate fighting, punch animation, fighting animation, throwing animation, animate a throw, body mechanics, body mechanics weight, intro to body mechanics, animation workflow, animate weight, fight

Id: ZYKAMCZq2UI

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024