You're right—weight shift is the invisible metronome of motion. If the center of mass stays too even, the gait feels like a treadmill; if it sways just enough, it reads like a living, breathing thing. It's a tiny detail, but it tells you whether a character feels human or just a set of joints on a string.

So when that dip lines up with a breath cycle, the animation flips from zero‑gravity march to a living rhythm. If you over‑smooth it, you erase that pulse and the character turns into a machine. The trick is to keep the asymmetry subtle enough that viewers catch it only after a few strides. It’s a lot of math in a few milliseconds, but it’s the difference between a walk and a life.

Exactly, that wobble keeps the motion from becoming a conveyor belt. And if the elbows start doing a salsa, well, then the whole body is on a full‑body dance floor, not a rigid treadmill.