Making movement smooth and believable is often the skill that prevents aspiring animators from getting hired. This is especially true if you're a new student, but it's even true if you're a veteran student or if you're a new professional going after your dream job. Today I'm going to show you how to have great mechanics. And what better example for this than Blizzard's Overwatch? Overwatch animation is fantastic in a lot of ways, not the least of which is body mechanics. And like most animation with fantastic mechanics, it has three critical elements. Number one, bulb posing. Number two, weight and impact. Number three, character driven movement. Here, let me show you. Let's first look at the dragon short with an ninja Genji. And let's talk about bulb posing. Posing is basic, but if you have trouble with strong mechanics, the trouble usually has its roots here. Let's look at Genji's dash. Can you read what's happening in the scene with just a few key poses? You can, right? Why? Three main reasons. Let's break it down. First up is silhouette. If we were to paint over the character, the poses are still clear. We can see Genji, sheathing his sword, dashing off, landing, jumping, and leaving frame. The second reason this works is line of action. There's a bold line throughout the body that anticipates a direction or an action. And we see that in each of these key poses of the dash. His body is very clearly targeting himself in one direction every step of the way. An alarm flows through the body to make everything feel connected. But line of action isn't limited to just poses. It can also apply to movement itself, even with everything else going on in this shot. We can read Genji reflecting heroes. The flow of the body and how each move connects as a reflex happen makes this possible. If you look at his position on screen, also, he stays roughly in the same place, keeping our focus on the arm reflex, keeping the busy action clear. Also with each pose here, Genji is appealing. He feels like an ninja, and his body never looks awkwardly positioned. His arms, knees, feet, don't look broken, at least when we can see the character clearly. But more on that later. Let's move on to the second critical element of great mechanics. Weight and impact. We must have it in our animations, no matter if the character is heavy or light, weak, or strong. Actually, it's essential to make any character feel heavy or light, weak, or strong. It's essential to make each character feel real. That's why the first thing that's important with weight and impact is believability. Every shot with great mechanics is believable. There are no eye swords that make us go, wait, what was that? There are no pops, swall smacks, hitches, or strobing. Nothing that really jars the eye. There's no exception to believability, no matter how broad or how subtle the moves are. Gravity and momentum is always considered. Check out the Gatlin gun thug from the soldier's short. His spine curls back and forth as he lifts this massive gun out of a box. At the same time, the gun is always dragging him behind, even though it's affecting the body. And if you pay close attention, you can see the gun belt where the ammo is, whipping all about even behind the Gatlin gun. For contrast though, let's look at Genji again, sheathing his sword. When his hand pushes the sword into the sheath, the momentum suddenly moves his body down into screen left. Then he bounces back up ever so slightly. Even though Genji is a super fast lightweight ninja, he still seems affected by gravity. Very believable. To sell weight in various amounts and believability, great mechanics also requires tightly controlled timing and spacing. A character's feet, hands, arms, legs, spine, head, and weapons must all be considered for every frame of the movement. Look at these in-game emotes. As the skater Lucio kicks his feet around, you can really feel the momentum pull his body into place. We feel the speed ups and the slowdowns because of the spacing, especially in the feet. And there is a lot of force that's generated from the body bouncing up and down. He gathers energy by going down and he spends that energy by popping up. Tracer, even though she is light and nimble, really feels affected by gravity here. The spacing is broad to give us that feeling of hang-time acceleration. If you just look at those hips, you can see how broad the spacing is. It gives everything away. It's a bouncing ball. Hanzo's hands really have a lot of impact here from the scene reasons. There's a lot of cushion for his hands to wind up and settle, but not the rest. There's maybe one or two frames for impact. As animators, though, if we want timing and spacing to feel natural, we can't have all the timing and spacing be the same. A leg, a hand, a hip shouldn't contact the ground on the scene frame. We must break that up because in real life, nothing happens at the same time. Different body parts must be leading or following. Soldier does some push-ups here. And if we look at a frame by frame, we can see the hands contacting the ground before the body hits its low point. They really catch the entire body. And later, there's even this bit where one hand tucks behind his back. And the other shoulder and arm is taking all of the weight. So what happens is that is leading as the other shoulder drags behind. There's just mainly in a rotation where that shoulder comes forward as the body is going up. So this is a basic example of how to break up movement so that nothing happens at the same time. But if you want to get far more weight and impact in your work, then there's something big that we haven't talked about. Exaggeration. Exaggeration is a tool to push your timing and spacing way beyond what's realistically possible for more oomph. Right heart hammers down here. You feel the impact and the weight, right? Now let's slow it down. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is this? Is this a mistake? The head is stretched. The leg is stretched. But wait, the spacing is tight. The head is got tight spacing towards the top of its arc and spacing gets more broad as it comes down. So it feels okay. Nothing is happening at the same time. And I didn't see the exaggeration at full speed. Here's another example. Let's see if you can spot the exaggeration. The Cree draws his gun here. This is more extreme, but it works. It's also important to note that you don't find this in every Overwatch animation. It's used where it's appropriate to match their style. If we had broken limbs and super stretched characters all the time for even slow moves, it would look really weird. How do you find style anyway? How do you even get ideas for these kinds of moves in the first place? The third element of great mechanics has the answer for you. That's movement driven by character. This is the most advanced element to great body mechanics. Why? It requires that you use all that you know to achieve a movement that matches your character's personality. Skipping this is the fastest way to have a jump, punch, kick, slash or any action animation feel generic. And it's a trap that most amateurs fall into. But if you always consider this, consider your character, your animations will eventually hold the uniqueness that makes people smile, laugh, or go, wow, that was amazing. Let me show you. McCree, the cowboy, gives a hat tip here. And because he's a classic cowboy, only someone with his charm would hat tip this way or even hat tip at all. But let's put this in perspective and let's look at Mei. Mei here uses her ice gun and makes an ice wall that she pops up on kind of by accident and gives a cute wave down. Now the Cree here wouldn't be like Mei if he did the scene move accidentally popping up on an ice wall and waiting down at us all cute, he would completely lose touch with the character that he is and we would feel weird. One more example, Reaper's sinister teleport here. Who else holds their head down with their knuckles this tight as they slowly rise from the ground? Only Reaper would move like death. What else can you take away from this? If your movement is driven by character, all you're posing, all you're weight, all your movements as a whole for an animation are easier to achieve. You'll know what ideas to trash and what to keep. Angel have an easier time self-critiquing if a movement feels right because of the character. It'll be much easier to entertain whoever looks at it because it will have personality. Now go take a look at your animations. Go take a look at your demo ring or any of these three elements missing or any of these three elements in need of massive improvement. Leave a comment below and let me know which one would make the biggest impact for your animation. Is it bold posing? Is it weight and impact? Is it movement driven by character? Which of those three? Let me know. Did you like this video? It's so, like subscribe and ring the bell for more just like this in the future. Until next time, feel free to check out some of the other videos over here and happy animating.