Up, down, up, down, hang on ... it's heavy!

After the huge plight of maya last week, hopefully this week maya will be nice to me, and you know what it was! Okay so I went through a few blocked out ideas with no successful result, but i got there in the end. This time we were set the assignment to animate a character picking up a really heavy weight.

It took a while to get my head around giving the illusion that a character is picking up a weighted item but after watching a few animations on youtube, i got a feel for how many ways there are of portraying weight and the motions that come before, during and after of the weight lifting.

Just from these few examples, you can see actually how different they all are even though they're all doing the same core thing. I decided to go for a rather simple idea: stepping up to the weight, misjudges the weight of the ball, picks it up slightly and then puts it back down again. After this, he readjusts himself and tries again, although this time he overbalances and walks back to balance himself. This video is halfway through but you can see it coming together,

Below is the finished product, and i'm very pleased with how it turned out. The movement is fluid throughout his body and there's the important illusion of a heavy weight.