How to Animate Weight - The Box Lift

Weight lift from the Animator's Survival Kit

One of the hardest things to achieve in 3D animation is the creation of a sense of weight. Weight is hard to simulate because our characters are just pixels - they have no intrinsic weight, so we have to create it from nothing. 

One of the more tricky exercises our students have to tackle is to animate a character lifting a heavy object, such as a box. The box is just a bunch of pixels - it has no weight. So the challenge is to make it appear heavy.

To get started, take a look at the thumbnail sketches on the left, taken from the book we recommend all our students buy - The Animator's Survival Kit. 

The thumbnails show how important it is for the character to get their feet right underneath the object they are going to lift.  That way, the weight of the object falls directly over the character's heels - and the object feels heavy. 

Get Those Feet Directly Under the Object

Both feet under the ball

Note how the character shuffles their feet forward to get them right under the ball. See the thumbnail sketch on the right, where the ball feels genuinely heavy, taking a close look at the feet. 

Then, the animator adds a vibration to the body as they start to lift upwards, making it feel really heavy and difficult. Maybe as the lift begins, the character keeps shuffling their feet forwards, to get them right under the centre of gravity. The harder the lift appears, the more heavy the object will feel.  

The Problem of Weight
To simulate weight, animators must learn to understand how gravity works.  This means understanding how our bodies move, how the physics works, and knowing where the weight is at any given point during any given action. 

Tell a Story

It's also important to tell a story. What is the character lifting, and why? What do they want? If you can create a sense of fun and entertainment around the shot, it becomes more than just a technical exercise. 

The Problem of Weight - Theory Video

To get started with the basic principles of animating weight, watch the video below:

Resources for Animating Weight at Escape Studios

To see more useful resources on how to animate weight, follow these links:

• Weight Tutorial with "Heavy" from Team Fortress
• Weight Tutorial - "Flour Sack Suicide" at Vimeo Channel
• Heavy "Throwing a Box" Tutorial with Marc Stevenson at Vimeo
• Using Dynamics to Simulate Weight (dice falling)

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our new BA/MArt now recruiting for September 2022, follow this link. To apply, visit the official page here.