Animation - Basic Body Mechanics

Learning to Make Characters Move

Introductory Body Mechanics involves learning how to move human characters within 3D space.

Before proceeding with this topic, it's best to already be comfortable with the animation basics.

Note: For these exercises, we're not worrying too much about personality or even making an animation that's interesting. It really should be a focus on simply "making characters move in a believable way." Personality can come later, once we're more experienced.

We can start by learning what rigging options are available to us in humanoid characters, such as IK and FK. Learn when these rigging options are useful, and how to access them.

From there, we learn to animate basic actions, such as:

Standing up from a chair
Picking up a box from the floor
Basic walk cycle
Basic run cycle
Basic jump
Basic wall climb

For any of these, it can be a good idea to try multiple times. It's best to feel pretty confident with these before moving on to more difficult concepts.

For example, did you try a Walk cycle animation exercise, and it just doesn't feel right? Not happy with it?

Don't get bogged down and spend weeks and weeks on it. Give it a genuine attempt, then move on, try other exercises, and come back later once you have more experience. Sometimes, it can be beneficial to try other exercises, rather than getting stuck and frustrated.

Even if you're happy with an exercise, it can still be good to come back and see if you can improve on it later! Animation is extremely complex, and repetition can help quite a bit!

And don't forget to start learning to use references!