How to Simulate Weight in Animation

Weight lift from the Animator's Survival Kit

One of the hardest things to achieve in 3D animation is the creation 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 at BNU 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. 

Weight Lift Animation by Anthoni Zakheos

Creating a believable sense of weight and balance is one of the hardest skills to acquire as an animator. After all, unlike stop-motion animation, our digital creations have no real weight at all: they are just collections of pixels moving around on a screen. The weight that the audience sees must be entirely simulated; the animator must maintain the illusion convincingly and plausibly throughout the shot.  One of our first year students, Anthoni Zakheos, recently competed an excellent piece of work showing a complete understanding of the tricks needed to pull of the illusion of weight.

Building a great animation reel - the problem of weight

The secret of a great animation reel is simple - it must be completely free of mistakes. As Aardman animator Matt Rees puts it: "you are only as good as the worst thing on your reel".