This paper presents a new motion planning method for an arbitrary solid with six degrees of freedom moving in a 3D environment. The essence of the method is to efficiently capture local moving information of the solid in order to speed up the heuristic search in the configuration space. For this purpose, the moving freedoms of a solid at any configuration are directly calculated by introducing the characteristic volume and characteristic obstacles of the solid. Based on the local information about the moving freedoms, a heuristic search similar to the A* is performed in the configuration space to find a collision-free path between the initial and final configurations. A 3D motion planning example shows that the method is capable of dealing with complex moving solids and environments. To increase the search efficiency in configuration space, some extensions of the methods for incorporating with global methods are discussed. Applications of the method in computer animation and virtual reality are indicated.