Animating with Blender

Analyzing Motion with Arcs

Most vertebrate creatures move in arcs. It is a direct consequence of having a skeleton with joints. It will not always occur this way in every action of every animation, but it happens frequently enough that checking the paths your character’s bones follow for arcs can improve your animation.

Shot 7, in which we see a full body view of the mother walking across the kitchen and kneeling to find the Beast, was difficult to animate. I went through several completely different attempts with different approaches. When I finally had something I was basically satisfied with (although I’m still not wild about the final result), I needed to further refine the motion.

Figure 11.34 shows what happened when I selected the main ...