How to Animate With Blender

Animate with Blender by setting keyframes for an object along an animation timeline. Keyframes are start and end frames of an animation sequence. Define an object's position, orientation and size for these frames, then let Blender compute the frames in between your keyframes to complete the animation. After you create a few animation sequences with Blender, use the Graph Editor window to manage your keyframes. This window's tools let you add and delete keyframes easily, and shape the curves that determine how Blender computes the frames in between the keyframes.

Instructions

1. Click the "Add" menu, then click one of the items in the list that appears, such as a cube or icosphere. Blender will place the object you selected in the central window.

2. Press the "I" key to display a list of different kinds of keyframes you can make for the object. Click "LocRotScale" to indicate you want to make a keyframe that records the location, rotation and scale of the object you created in the previous step.

3. Click the green vertical bar at the bottom of the application window, then drag right to the last frame you want to appear in the animation. For example, if you want to create an animated sequence that lasts for 100 frames, drag the green bar to the "100" mark. Blender's default frame rate is 24 frames per second, so 100 frames will provide a little over four second's worth of animation.

4. Click in the "End" text box at the bottom of the screen, then type the number of the animation frame you dragged the vertical bar to in the previous step. For example, type "100." This action tells Blender to stop playing the animation when it reaches the frame number you entered.

5. Click the "Translate," "Rotate" or "Scale" button in the left pane to run a command for transforming your object. "Translate" is another term for "Move."

6. Drag on the canvas to perform the transformation you selected in the previous step. For example, if you clicked "Rotate," drag the mouse to rotate the object.

7. Use the instructions from step 2 to create another keyframe for the end of your animation, then press the ">" button at the bottom of the window to play the completed animation.

References

• "Blender Foundations"; D. Roland Hess; 2010