AnimationIntermediate

Follow Through

Loose parts keep moving after the main body stops — hair, capes, weapon tips.

animation-principlephysicalitypolish

Examples

Captured from this page's own interactive demo below.

Overview

Follow through lets secondary parts of a moving object — hair, cloth, antennae, a big sword's tip, a UI element's contents — continue traveling briefly after the main mass stops, then settle back.

It's the physical complement to anticipation: energy has to be gathered before an action and dissipated after it. Nothing in the real world stops all at once, so a character who does looks rigid and weightless.

In games it's most visible as procedural secondary motion — the jiggle of a ponytail after a dash stops, a backpack bouncing after a landing — and it does more for perceived animation quality per unit of effort than almost anything else.

Interactive Demo

Follow Lag80ms

Settle Damping0.5

Use Cases

PlatformerRPGCombatUI

Best Practices

Do

✓Drive follow through procedurally (spring-damper toward the parent's position) so it works for any motion automatically.
✓Give different materials different lag and damping — heavy cloth settles slower than short hair.
✓Apply it in UI too: let a panel's content lag a few pixels behind the panel itself when it slides in.

Don't

✕Don't apply follow through to the gameplay-critical parts — the sword's hitbox should match the committed animation, only the visual tip lags.
✕Don't overlap it with manual keyframed secondary motion on the same bones; pick one source of truth.
✕Don't let the settle oscillate more than 2–3 times — beyond that it reads as broken springs, not weight.

Common Mistakes

⚠Springs tuned per-object in isolation, so a character's hair whips wildly at gameplay movement speeds never tested in the tuning scene.
⚠Follow-through applied uniformly in world space, ignoring the parent's rotation.
⚠Forgetting to clamp spring extension, so a fast teleport stretches the ponytail across the level.

Implementation

Paste this into your AI assistant (Cursor, Copilot, Claude) to add the effect to your project.

Prompt

Add the "Follow Through" game-feel effect to my project: Loose parts keep moving after the main body stops — hair, capes, weapon tips.

How it works: Follow through lets secondary parts of a moving object — hair, cloth, antennae, a big sword's tip, a UI element's contents — continue traveling briefly after the main mass stops, then settle back.

Guidelines:
- Drive follow through procedurally (spring-damper toward the parent's position) so it works for any motion automatically.
- Give different materials different lag and damping — heavy cloth settles slower than short hair.
- Apply it in UI too: let a panel's content lag a few pixels behind the panel itself when it slides in.

Avoid:
- Don't apply follow through to the gameplay-critical parts — the sword's hitbox should match the committed animation, only the visual tip lags.
- Don't overlap it with manual keyframed secondary motion on the same bones; pick one source of truth.
- Don't let the settle oscillate more than 2–3 times — beyond that it reads as broken springs, not weight.

Implement the effect in whatever engine/stack the project already uses and follow its existing code style. Wire it up where it makes sense.