Animation in Blender gets better with every new release and update, and you now have tons of tools at your disposal.
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In this Blender Animation tutorial, we’re going to walk you through your first keyframe—as well as mention some extraordinarily useful tools, menus, and systems you should take advantage of.
how to animate in blender
Begin with your first keyframe pose. We’re using a puppet with built-in rigging, but it’s worth remembering that animation can be applied to any type of object and any type of distortion or translation. For example, a “pose” can be as simple as the top of a box with a lid open.
Once you have made your first pose, use the I key to prompt the Insert Keyframe menu. You can also add a new keyframe via the Auto Keyframe toggle, which will automatically create a new keyframe any time the keyframed property changes.
You have several options here, and many of them are pretty self-explanatory. In this case, we’re going with a simple rotation keyframe, which will animate the difference in rotation between these two positions on the timeline. Add another keyframe to continue.
Now, hit the spacebar. You should see your rudimentary little kitty playing happily. However, this is only the first step when animating in Blender; From here, there are a number of ways you can consider continuing.
If you’re ambitious, part of the magic will lie in your ability to break down entire sequences into pieces you can deal with—once you’ve nailed down the foundations of your animation and worked well on screen. So it is very easy to jump in and make every moment your own. The more ideas and secondary movement you provide with each flourish, the longer your animation is going to sing in playback.
However, before you’re there, you’ll need to learn some basic phrases.
Blender Animation Basics
Armature: These are the “bones” that let you manipulate your puppet or object, predictably deform it without worrying about losing the character or integrity of the mesh.
Keyframes: Two unique locations along the timeline where a given object or piece of geometry exists at two different values. In the first keyframe, it’s right here—and in the next, it’s moved two feet to the right, with the average, interpolated values occupying the median space between each position.
Main Posture: Somewhere in the “major” that your character should land; One prominent pose might be holding a glass of water, while another might show them pulling on their lips.
Interpolation: the way in which a keyframe value is “ramped off” between each checkpoint; A keyframe can be fixed, truly linear, quadratic, or determined through Bezier or linear interpolation.
Constraints: These can add functionality to a rig or animation by involving the motion of an object along the path of a two-dimensional curve, to name one example.
Parenting: This animation tool puts your entire model together when you’re done with it—the limbs are the parents of the body, and each arm and leg is the parent to the end from which it extends.
Inverse Kinematics: Once you have some bones in your model, you can use IK to make them behave like a series of arm or leg segments when you move a wrist, arm, or leg.
Path: You can coordinate your character’s motion by connecting them or a part of them to an animation path, usually some kind of curve.
Drivers: These are automatic means of control, the values depend on the condition of your model elsewhere.
Animations can be applied to an object or character, but you can also animate non-object elements such as cameras and lights. The quality of your animation has a lot to do with how you are able to fit all these different pieces together.
For example, when building something like a husky insect, you can use constraints and drivers to limit the stride of each foot to a perfect curve. This may sound like a terrible idea on paper, but it is important to remember that almost all hierarchical movement is tied to the arc of the limb.
Keeping this knowledge in mind, it will also become very easy to animate inanimate objects; Think of the arc of a nunchaku as someone swinging it with a handle. Just like when you’re first learning to model with common geometric primitives, you’ll start to make these connections naturally, based on observation, the more you practice and turn your gears.
What Can You Do With Blender’s Animation Tools?
The example above illustrates the simplest possible type of animation in Blender: keyframing a single parameter onto a rigid model exactly once.
You would generally animate in Blender via keyframes (or even scripts and other advanced tools if you have the information). However, disregarding these, there are three major ways to move objects and characters in Blender.