Animation Tools Intro

Now let’s talk about animation tools. In this module we’ll be going over the tools you need to understand and use for the purposes of animation in Blender. They’re pretty straightforward, but don’t worry if you get lost. You’ll get used to them in no time once you start animating. The tools we’ll be discussing are the timeline, key frames, pose mode, the dope sheet, the graph editor, curves, and cameras.

To give a quick overview, the timeline is what gives us the ability to view and understand timing for our animation. It also controls certain playback options, such as frame range. Key frames are what we use to tell the computer what poses of our character we want at different times. Pose mode is the mode we’ll be using to pose the rigs, which allows us to dynamically change the pose of our character over time.

The dope sheet and graph editor are two tools that help us visualize and edit our key frames to fine tune our animation. Curves are a more advanced form of key frames that allow us to fine tune the interpolation between key frames. And cameras are what we’ll be using to film and render our scene, just like a real camera. In the next video, I’ll be teaching you how to make a simple bouncy ball animation to help you get familiar with the timeline and setting key frames.