In this tutorial, Animation Mentor Game Animation and Character Animation mentor Natasha Krinsky breaks down how to animate climbing and hanging shots so they read as physically believable. Using student examples and a full blocking to spline pass of her own, she covers how to sell body weight, use momentum, and keep IK hands from feeling stiff and glued in place.
Meet Natasha Krinsky
With experience on major game titles like Life is Strange, Madden, and Clockwork Revolution, Natasha brings a wealth of industry knowledge to her students at Animation Mentor. Her focus: helping animators master the art of nuanced, emotional performances. She mentors students in both the 3D Character Animation program and 3D Game Animation program.
You can learn more about Natasha here.
Why Weight Comes First
Climbing and hanging shots live or die on whether the character’s weight feels real. Krinsky points out that pulling your own body weight up, roughly 100 pounds or more for most adults, is genuinely hard, closer to doing a strict pull-up than a casual reach. If a character climbs too easily, without any sense of effort, the shot stops reading as believable. Strength and momentum both need to be considered together, since most characters climbing something use their legs to swing and build momentum rather than muscling straight up with their arms alone.
Reading Strength Through Student Examples
Krinsky walks through a few existing student shots to show how weight and strength show up differently depending on the character. In one, a character named Stewart struggles to pull himself onto a rock, bringing a leg up because he can’t manage a full pull-up, then looks visibly tired once he reaches a ledge. In another, a character named Stella uses a running start and the momentum of contact with a wall to pull off a stronger, more athletic flip onto a ledge. A Spider-Man example uses swinging momentum across multiple beats to chain flips together. Comparing these side by side shows how the same climbing action can read as either strained or confident, depending on how much momentum and effort the animator builds in.
Blocking From Video Reference
For her own demonstration, Krinsky uses video reference of a rock climber and blocks out the main poses on Stewart, adjusting details that don’t apply, like removing a bag the reference climber reaches for. She identifies the key beats: the starting hang, the leg swing that builds momentum, the pull up onto the rock, and the shift to climbing faster once most of the body’s weight is supported by the rock itself rather than hanging free. She also switches the character’s hands to IK for this shot, the same reasoning used for feet, since the hands need to stay locked onto the rock without sliding.
The Problem With IK Hands
Moving into spline, Krinsky flags the main challenge of this kind of shot directly: IK hands tend to feel cemented and stiff once they make contact with a surface. The weight and effort read fine early in the shot, but the hands can look like they’re glued to the rock rather than gripping it.
Fixing the Cemented Feel With Motion Trails
To solve this, Krinsky uses motion trails on the hands to check the quality of the curves and adds small amounts of keep alive, tiny shifts and re-adjustments in the hand’s position after it makes contact, so it reads as a hand resettling its grip rather than locking into place. She also works on the arcs themselves, replacing flat or overly linear motion with rounder curves, adding rotation as the hand lifts off the rock, and adjusting clipping where the hand or elbow pokes through the rock’s surface. Finger overlap gets added as an additional layer to help sell the grip.
Fixing a Broken Wrist
Partway through, Krinsky runs into a broken wrist, a common technical snag when keys get moved or retimed during cleanup. She works through it in real time, checking the shot from multiple camera angles since a curve that looks fine from one angle can still read as broken from another, and adjusting key timing until the wrist motion holds together across angles.
Final Polish and Takeaways
By the end of the pass, the shot reads as a hand that adjusts and resettles against the rock rather than one that’s stuck to it, with the finger and wrist detail doing most of the work to sell that feeling. Krinsky notes the shot still needs more finished hand posing to fully sell the grip, but the core technique, checking motion trails, adding keep alive, and confirming curves from more than one camera angle, applies to any climbing or hanging shot.
Want to be mentored by professional animators like Natasha?
At the core of Animation Mentor are our 3D Character Animation and Game Animation programs. Follow your animation dreams by learning from animators at studios like Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar, ILM, Riot Games, Netflix, and Blizzard!
