It’s easy to fall into the trap of making your animation look too stiff, especially when using poses directly from a video reference. One way to counter this is to exaggerate the drag and overlap of the main body controls – the hips, the chest, and the head. In a scene where the hips lead, the chest would follow the hips, and the head would follow the chest, and you can play around with the overlaps to achieve a more organic look. In this clip, instructor Luke Randall does a live Maya demonstration in student Saul Latorre’s shot, helping him get a more organic and springy feel in a portion of his animation by working with the translations of the main body control, the chest, and the head. Luke is an animator at Dreamworks, and is an instructor for Body Acting, our fourth course in 3D character animation.

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