Blender All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 1

Animating Objects

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the basics of animation

Using the Timeline and Graph Editor for object animation

Discovering how to animate and insert keyframes in Blender

Ihave to make a small admission: Animation is not easy. It’s time consuming, frustrating, tedious work where you often spend days, sometimes even weeks, working on what ends up to be a few seconds of finished animation. An enormous amount of work goes into animation. However, there’s something incredible about making an otherwise inanimate object move, tell a story, and communicate to an audience. Getting those moments when you have beautifully believable motion — life, in some ways — is a positively indescribable sensation that is, well, indescribably positive. Animation and the process of creating animation truly has my heart more than any other art form. It’s simply my favorite thing to do. It’s like playing with a sock puppet, except better because you don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s been washed.

This chapter, as well as the rest of the chapters in Book 4, go pretty heavily into the technical details of creating animations using Blender. Blender is a great tool for ...