Posing - Danimation/Animation-Resources GitHub Wiki

Understanding posing is fundamental to good animation. If your posing is weak your animation is going to be weak as well.

There are a lot of things to keep in mind when it comes to your posing, it is a complex subject but you will get better the more you focus on it. Some areas to focus on are:

  1. Line of action
  2. Weight and Balance
  3. Asymmetry
  4. Motivation/Personality
  5. Readability/Silhouette

As with most things when it comes to animation and art, reference is key and good reference is important. It is a lot easier to understand an action if you act it out and film yourself acting it out. Understanding the distribution of weight and the physicality of the action/pose is important and easier to grasp if you do said action/pose. It might be hard to film yourself at first but you become accustomed to it fairly quickly.

What to avoid

There are a few things you want to make sure you avoid in your poses. You want to make sure you avoid:

  1. Symmetry/Twining - People and animals are not robots, they do not move, stand or emote the same way on either side of the body. Add some variation to either side of the body, this makes a huge difference to how natural a pose feels. The variation does not need to be extreme in every case, knowing when to use subtly is important. If a character is delivering a line of dialogue and the action is muted, you would be a lot more subtle with your posing versus a character that is angry and shouting.

  1. Off Balance/No sense of gravity - Unless your character is in space or water, you need to make sure that they are being affected by gravity in their posing. In most cases, you want your character to be balanced in their pose and not like they are going to fall over. Think about your character's centre of mass, this should be placed in such a way that your character would not fall over unless that is the intention of the pose.

  1. Stereotypical and Bland - When you think of poses try not to go with a stereotypical, try to think outside of the box with your poses. An example of a pose to avoid would be the stereotypical thinking pose with the hand under the chin. Embody your poses with the personality of the character, each pose tells a bit of your story.

What to do

We want our poses to feel as natural as possible, and a lot of your posing choices will be dictated by the character you are animating, for example, a robot vs an old man.

But there are some basic things that you want to be thinking about at all times with your poses. You want to be focusing on things such as asymmetry, weight distribution and the line of action.