Make your character move
Last updated: 8 August 2026
Yes, you can make your character wave, walk, jump and dance. And the fiddly part is already done for you.
This page explains what that means, what you can and cannot make it do, and where to start in each program.
What animating actually is
Animating sounds hard. It is really one idea: put your character in a pose, save it, move time forward a bit, put it in a different pose, save that too. The program fills in everything in between.
Those saved poses are called keyframes. A wave is about four of them. That is the whole idea.
Why your character is ready for this
To animate something, three things have to be true. All three already are:
| The body is in separate pieces | Yes — 6 to 9 of them |
|---|---|
| Each piece turns from the right spot | Yes — arms at the shoulder, legs at the hip, head at the neck |
| The pieces are joined to the body | Yes — turn the body and everything follows |
That middle one is the part people usually have to set up by hand, and it is the part that goes wrong. If a shoulder is in the wrong place, the arm swings from the character's hip instead and looks broken. Yours are already in the right places.
You might hear that you need a "rig" or a "skeleton". You do not. Those are for characters made of soft, bendy skin that has to stretch — like a person in a cartoon film.
Your character is made of solid blocks. Blocks do not bend, so there is nothing to set up. You turn whole pieces instead. This is how blocky game characters have always been animated.
What you can make it do
Plenty:
- Waving
- Walking and running
- Jumping
- Turning its head to look at something
- Dancing
- Standing still but breathing gently, so it does not look frozen
What it cannot do
Worth knowing now rather than after an hour of trying:
- Bending. An arm cannot curve. It is a solid block, so it can only turn as a whole.
- Squashing and stretching. The rubbery look in cartoons needs bendy skin, which your character does not have.
- Faces that move. No blinking or talking mouths. The face is painted on.
Small turns look better than big ones. When you turn a block a long way, you can start to see a gap where it meets the body, or a corner poking through.
This is normal for blocky characters — Minecraft does exactly the same thing and nobody minds. Keep arm and leg swings gentle and you will never see it.
Where to start in each program
Blender — the best one for this
Open your character (see the Blender guide). Then:
-
Pose your character
Click an arm and press
Rto turn it. -
Save the pose
Press
Iand choose Rotation. You have made your first keyframe. -
Move forward in time and do it again
Drag the blue marker along the strip at the bottom. Turn the arm somewhere new. Press
Iagain. -
Watch it
Press the spacebar. Your character moves between the poses on its own.
When you are happy, you can export it as a .glb again with the
movement saved inside.
Godot — good if you are making a game
Follow the Godot guide to bring your character in and unlock its body parts. Then add an AnimationPlayer to your scene.
It works the same way as Blender: pose a body part, save a keyframe, move along, pose it again. It saves the same Rotation numbers you were typing in by hand.
Roblox Studio — a bit more work
Studio does not animate loose parts. It needs them joined together first with something called Motor6D, which is Roblox's word for a joint that can move.
Roughly, you:
-
Join the parts
Add a Motor6D between each body part and the body — arm to body, head to body, and so on.
-
Add a Humanoid
Put a Humanoid inside your model, in the Explorer list.
-
Open the Animation Editor
Now Studio's animation tools will work on your character. They work on non-human shapes too, as long as the parts are joined with Motor6D.
This is the most fiddly of the three. If you have never done it before, try it in Blender or Godot first so you can see it working.
A tip that makes animation look good
Move more than one thing. A wave where only the arm moves looks stiff. A wave where the arm moves, the head tilts a little, and the body leans a tiny bit looks alive.
You do not need big movements. Small ones on several body parts beat one big one every time.
Notes
The Roblox Studio steps are based on Roblox's own creator documentation, which states that the Animation Editor works on human and non-human rigs as long as the moving parts are connected with Motor6D joints. The Blender and Godot steps were run against real characters made on this site. Menu names in all three programs change between versions.
© 2026 Makoto Dev Experiments. What you make here is yours to use, including in games you sell. The site's own words, pictures and code are not free to copy.