Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10

Animating Objects

In This Chapter

• Using the Graph Editor
• Putting constraints on objects and taking advantage of these constraints
• Practicing with animation

I have 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. The process of animation truly has my heart more than any other aspect of computer graphics. 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 wondering whether or not it's been washed.

This chapter, as well as the following three chapters, go pretty heavily into the technical details of creating animations using Blender. Blender is a great tool for the job. Beyond what this book can provide you with, though, animation is about seeing, understanding, and re-creating motion. I highly recommend that you make it a point to get out and watch things. And not just animations: Go to a park and study how people move. Try to move like other people move so that you can understand how the weight shifts and how gravity and inertia ...