chapter 8

Weight

The creation of weight in animation is something that challenges many animators. Far too many characters and objects that are poorly animated tend to float around as if they are of no volume or mass at all—or more importantly, they are impervious to the effects of gravity. However, the animation that really works, that convinces us that the characters are working and existing within a real world subject to the laws of that real world, are those that have an element of weight integrated into their movement.

Weight is not an easy quality to define, but there are essential core rules and principles that we can add to our animation that make everything we do more convincing. In the previous notebook on jumps, we began to hint at ...

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