In this tutorial, Animation Mentor mentor and animator Joseph White walks through a full push and pull animation exercise, from shooting reference to blocking, splining, and early polish in Maya. He focuses on force, balance, and intent so your character feels like they are truly interacting with a heavy object instead of sliding it around effortlessly. Watch the full video above.
Meet Joseph White
Joseph White has over 15 years of experience in end-to-end production management for both print and video mediums. He teaches the Maya Animation course at Animation Mentor.
Studying Reference for Force and Weight
Joseph starts by stressing how critical it is to think about what your character is moving and the environment they are moving it in. He looks at factors like the size, weight, and mass of the object, and how surfaces, friction, and wheels affect the way the body behaves.
He demonstrates this by reviewing multiple pieces of live action reference he shot himself, including pushing on a van, struggling with a trash can over textured tiles, and working with a wheeled cart. By stepping through the footage, he studies line of action, up and down weight shifts, foot slips, and how the body uses leverage and momentum, similar to an inchworm building energy to move forward.
Thumbnails Before Maya
Before opening Maya, Joseph creates thumbnails based on the reference to understand where the weight is and how it travels through the body over time. He emphasizes that thumbnailing lets you experiment, change ideas, and clarify poses without risking destructive changes to your Maya scene.
Rather than rotoscoping or matching the reference frame by frame, he aims to capture the essence and feeling of the motion. Joseph notes that this approach keeps you from being locked into the exact timing of the video and frees you to push poses for clearer force, appeal, and readability in your animation.
Blocking the Push and Pull in Maya
Once thumbnails are ready, Joseph sets up his shot in Maya using the Stuart character and a box with modeled handles, then starts blocking the push and pull using stepped curves. He begins in FK (Forward Kinematics) on the arms for a natural swinging motion as the character approaches, then switches the arms to IK (Inverse Kinematics) when the hands make contact with the box to keep them locked solidly on the object.
He walks through establishing contact poses and key passing positions over roughly 180 frames, focusing on clear C and reverse C shapes to show force. Joseph lowers the character’s center of gravity and drives the hips and torso forward, using the spine like a spring so the push feels powerful, then sets up a recovery where the character stands and transitions into a pull that uses body lean and a backward step for momentum.
Using IK, Clean Keys, and Step Mode
Joseph explains why IK is ideal for pushes, pulls, and any situation where hands or feet must stay planted on an object or surface. He contrasts this with FK, which is great for arcs and swings but makes it much harder to maintain solid contact, especially for feet unless the character is in very specific situations.
Throughout blocking, he keeps everything in step mode and avoids scrubbing, using the greater than and less than keys to flip through poses. He regularly checks that only intentional keys are present, deleting extras and keeping the scene clean so nothing moves unexpectedly between poses, which would lead to robotic or jittery motion once curves are splined.
Adding Breakdowns Before Splining
Joseph warns against jumping straight from rough blocking to spline, calling this a common mistake. Instead, he advocates adding breakdowns and offsets while still in blocking so ideas like overlap, anticipation, and follow through are designed with purpose rather than left to the computer’s interpolation.
He shows how he progresses to a second version of the file where breakdowns are in place and then converts curves to spline. At this stage, the animation is still rough, with pops and timing issues, but the structure is strong because the major poses and in-betweens already support the sense of weight and force in both the push and pull actions.
Early Polish: Fixing Pops, Timing, and Contact
In the splined version, Joseph demonstrates how to troubleshoot common problems, such as a hip that stops moving while the box continues or a sudden jump caused by an unintended key. He recommends copying neighboring keys with S on the frame before and after, then deleting the bad key rather than counter-animating yourself into a corner.
He also adjusts the motion of the box so it stays properly connected to the hands, tweaks body rotation and spine shape to maintain strong lines of action, and fixes staging so the character looks where they are going instead of straight down. Joseph reinforces the value of checking the animation from multiple camera angles, making incremental changes, and keeping the graph editor organized as you refine timing and spacing.
By the end of the walkthrough, the push and pull exercise reads clearly, with visible effort, believable weight transfer, and a strong sense of the character’s intent. Joseph encourages animators to bring this mindset of reference, thumbnails, clean blocking, and careful splining into their own push and pull animations so heavy-object shots feel grounded and physically convincing.
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