Category: Maya

Workshop: Weight Shift

During the Weight Shift workshop, my tutor pointed out that my animation looked a little floaty, as if the character wasn’t fully grounded.

This feedback helped me realise that I need to pay more attention to how the character’s weight shifts and how the body responds to gravity. In my next revision, I will focus on improving the timing, balance, and centre of gravity to make the movement feel more natural and convincing.

Walk Cycle

Learning Reflection

This week, we focused on Walk Cycle Animation and learned how to create a natural walking movement by understanding basic body mechanics.

One of the most important things I learned is that walking is not simply about moving the legs forward and backward. It involves the movement of the entire body, especially the shifting of weight and the coordination between different body parts. Since walking is such a familiar movement in everyday life, even small mistakes in timing or balance can make an animation look unnatural.

During the lesson, we studied the four key poses of a walk cycle: Contact, Down, Passing, and Up. These poses helped me understand how the body’s weight and height change during each step. I also learned about the importance of the Centre of Gravity (COG), including how the hips move up and down, shift from side to side, and rotate during walking.

Another interesting point was how the chest, head, and arms respond to the movement of the lower body. The arms do not simply swing independently. Their movement is connected to the body’s motion, involving principles such as Follow Through and Overlapping Action.

Assignment: Walk Cycle (Lower Body blk)

During this week’s Walk Cycle assignment, my tutor pointed out that my character’s feet were not making full contact with the ground, which made the walking movement look less natural.

I also learned that the hips should not move forward and backward in a walk cycle in place. Instead, I should focus on the hips’ side-to-side rotation and up-and-down movement. Otherwise, the animation may look strange when the character actually moves forward in space.

Overlapping

Assignment

Bouncing Balls Acting – Polish

Weight Shift – Planning

This lesson helped me understand that 3D animation is a gradual process, rather than simply moving a character between keyframes. I also learned a lot about video references. In previous projects, I often found it difficult to find suitable references, which made the animation process more challenging. This workshop showed me that animators don’t just imagine movements from scratch; they can act them out themselves and use the recordings as references. In future projects, I will use this method to support my animation process and make my work more effective.

1. Shot Planning

Good planning is essential for a successful animation. Before starting, it is important to prepare video references, organise assets and set up the scene properly.

Video Reference

I learned that video references help us understand four key aspects of animation: timing, layout, weight and acting. When recording references, it is useful to try different versions of an action, use a camera angle similar to the final shot and keep the face visible to study facial expressions.

Before importing reference videos into Maya, they need to be converted into image sequences. The frame rate (FPS) and file naming format should also be checked to ensure everything works correctly.

Setting Up the Scene

Before animating, all necessary assets should be prepared, including character rigs, environment models, audio files, cameras and video references. In Maya, the project directory, resolution, plugins, preferences and rig settings also need to be configured.

2. Animation Stage

The animation process gradually develops from simple poses into smooth, detailed movement. Each stage focuses on a different part of the process.

• Layout: Establish the camera angle, staging and overall timing of the shot.
• Rough Blocking: Create the main key poses and breakdowns to define the basic action and timing.
• Blocking: Add more poses and in-betweens while keeping the animation in stepped mode, making it easier to check the poses before refining the movement.
• Blocking Plus: Start adjusting animation curves in the Graph Editor to improve the motion.
• Polish / Animation: Switch to spline curves for smoother movement, refine the timing and spacing, and add frame-by-frame details to create a more polished result.

Assignment

1. Pendulum

Light pendulum

Timing: Faster movement and quicker reactions.

Spacing: Wider spacing during fast movement and closer spacing when slowing down.

Inertia: Less visual sense of weight; changes direction more easily.

Overlapping: Can start moving or change direction earlier than the heavy pendulum.

Arc: The ball at the bottom swings through a wider arc, and the string swings and wobbles along with the ball, creating a looser and more flexible movement.

Heavy pendulum

Heavy Pendulum

Timing: More deliberate movement, with a stronger sense of weight.

Spacing: Gradually accelerates during the swing and slows down near the turning points.

Inertia: Stronger sense of momentum; movement feels harder to stop or redirect suddenly.

Overlapping: Can start moving or change direction later to create a delay in the motion.

Arc: The ball at the bottom swings through a smaller arc, and the string stays taut and relatively straight as the heavy ball pulls on it.

2.Golden pose

Dancing pose

Sad emotion

Regret emotion

1. Timing & Spacing

This is one of the most important basic concepts we learned this week.

The presentation first introduced the Time Chart :

A planning chart that shows the timing, spacing and placement of drawings between key poses.

It can be understood as a movement planning chart for animation. It helps us decide:

• How many frames a movement needs
• How many in-between frames should be placed between keyframes
• The distance between each frame
• Whether the movement accelerates or slows down

Timing ≠ Spacing

These two concepts are easy to confuse.

Timing is how long a movement takes, while spacing describes the distance between each frame.

• Timing = how many frames a movement takes
• Spacing = the distance between each frame

By changing timing and spacing, we can make an object feel faster, slower, lighter, or heavier.

My Understanding

I can think of it simply as:

Timing = How long?
Spacing = How does it move during that time?

Therefore, even if two objects both use 20 frames, they can still have completely different feelings of weight.

2. Weight & Physics

We also looked at the basic physics of movement:

F = m × a

A heavier object needs more time to accelerate under the same force. This means that mass can affect how quickly an object starts moving or changes its speed.

For animation, this helps us create more believable movement and weight.

3. An Example from Attack on Titan

During the class, the teacher used the example of a giant and a small character to explain how different sizes and weights can affect movement.

This reminded me of Attack on Titan. The Titans often move with large movements and relatively slow timing, which makes their bodies feel huge and heavy. In comparison, the human characters move much faster and their actions usually have smaller movements and shorter spacing.

This made me realise that movement size, timing and spacing can work together to communicate the scale and weight of a character.

4. Further reading

The Animator’s Survival Kit

I read pages 84–99 of Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit, which focuses on spacing and movement.

Key Points

• Spacing: In-between frames should not always be placed exactly in the middle. Different spacing can create different speeds and feelings of movement.
• Mass & Contact: Animators should think about objects as masses. Squash and deformation should happen at the moment of contact to make weight feel believable.
• Movement Arcs: Most natural movements follow curved paths. Using clear arcs can make animation smoother and more natural.
• Fast Movement: Elongated in-betweens can help create the feeling of speed and motion blur.
• Common Mistake: Beginners often put too much movement into too little time. Adding more frames can make the action clearer and easier to follow.

The Basics of Animation Production: The Art of Time and Space – TED Ed

During the class, the teacher showed us the TED-Ed video The Basics of Animation Production: The Art of Time and Space. I watched it again in my free time and posted it here for future review.

5. Assignment

Bouncing Balls

Table tennis ball

time chart

graph editor

motion

playblast side view

Beach ball

time chart

graph editor

motion

playblast side view

Bowling ball

time chart

graph editor

motion

playblast side view

Golden Poses

Hero pose

Sitting pose

Angry pose