Animation - Part B - The Wheel

The wheel of a train is a large, heavy lump of metal. What does this have to do with the animation? Everything. The wheel is not an airweight piece of plastic, and therefore shouldn't be treated like one. Sure, I could say that the hydraulics in SteamBot's arm are powerful enough to lift the wheel with ease... but where would the fun be in that? Where would the personification and 'human' characteristics come in? Precisely: No where. So SteamBot would either look superhuman or the wheel would look flimsy. Either way, it's not very helpful. So the trick here was to try and mirror the movements and motions of a normal person, and apply them to SteamBot

So how do you prop up a heavy wheel? It's too heavy to just flip on its side in a single movement. In fact it'd be probably be so heavy that you couldn't lift it cleanly. My guess, much like handling any other heavy object: Is that you get your hands beneath it, and start to lift it to the point where you can quickly lift it and put your weight beneath it. From here, you can lift the full weight with your entire body (Not just your arms / back). Thus, the same principle applied here! The first step was therefore to have SteamBot lifting the wheel before it could put its weight behind it. So we started with it gripping the edge and starting to lift, but as it does you, you will see that it wraps its claw around, so that it has a more secure grip.

Next step is to put your weight behind it. Because it was too large and SteamBot is not able to crouch down, the best way of tackling this was to have SteamBot quickly 'throw' the wheel up, creating a sufficient gap to roll in and put its weight behind it. This bit was pretty easy, as I just had to fling SteamBot's arm up and move it forward. The trick bit was moving the wheel. The movement had to give off the impression that the wheel was exceptionally heavy (Rather than drifting in air and softly gliding back down), and so it had to move slightly, and immediately fly down with a lot of force.

The final bit was the easiest. With its weight now behind the wheel, SteamBot only had to trundle forward and straighten its arm. Providing it was made slow enough, so that the wheel still looked like it carried a lot of weight, the animation was pretty simple.