juicy blender Tute104 - Keyframe animation



I want you to start with a
clean blender. Press
CTRL X now. This will start  blender
clean.

What we are going to do is create a cube and make it move
around and rotate etc.

Press
SPACE then ADD then MESH then CUBE.

Scale
SKey it until it looks roughly this size .



Press
TAB to exit editmode.

The way blender  animates objects is with KEYFRAMES. These
are like little markers that define  where an object is at a
certain frame.

For example if we created a  keyframe at frame 1 then went to
frame 25, moved the cube and created another keyframe, the
cube would move between the two positions over 25  frames.

It would look like this
(without the up/down mistake I made! :)
Gotta love that persistance o' vision!

Lets give that a go!



Create a KEYFRAME in blender by pressing the
IKey. After
pressing it a menu appears with various  keyframes we can
create.


We only want to record the location of the cube, so press
the
LOC button. What this has done is to record that at
frame 1 the cube is at that  location.

Now we want the cube to be on the left of the screen after
25 frames (one second in PAL TV standard). To do this press
the
UPARROW twice which will take us to frame 21.
Then press the
RIGHTARROW four(4) times to bring the time
to 25.


Move the cube
GKey to where you want it to end up at the end
of the animation and press the
IKey again.
And  again press
LOC. This will record that at frame 25 the
cube is in the new position.

Press
SHIFT LEFTARROW to rewind to the start of the
animation. Now press
ALT A to play the animation back.
Pressing
ESC will stop the playback and rewind to the
first frame.


You should have a nice animation of the cube moving from
where you created the first keyframe to  where you created
the last.



You may experiment with  this more by moving to other
frame numbers (say 10) and moving the cube again and
inserting keyframes where desired.



I also want to encourage you to rotate the cube and try
the
LOCROT option after pressing Ikey. You will see
the cube spining as well as moving.



Try scaling
SKey the cube and inserting SCALE keys.
When you feel a little comfortable with keyframes and
how they work try out the next tute,
105 Complex  keyframing and Animation Curves (A)

Here is a list of animation  related keys.


UpArrow move 10 frames up.
DownArrow moves 10  frames down.
Right arrow moves 1 frame up.
Left arrow moves 1 frame down.
SHIFT LEFTARROW moves to the first frame.
SHIFT  RIGHTARROW moves to the last frame.
ALT A plays the animation.
IKey inserts keyframes.
NUMPAD9 refreshes the animation system.