Animation
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| Agent 327 operation barbershop |
Animation is making an object move or change shape over time. As a person like us, who are using Blender, animation is our main goal. So We need to know "what is animation" in the first place. Objects can be animated in many ways. In Blender, we can animate objects in several ways.
- Moving as a whole object
- Changing their position, orientation, or size in time.
- Deforming them
- Animating their vertices or control points;
- Inherited animation
Causing the object to move based on the movement of another object. This means moving a parented object, Moving an arm of a character's body e.t.c
Colors for Animation
Blender uses some colors to show us some information when we are animating objects. For a beginner, it is very useful to know these colors and where are they used.
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| Colors to show animation details |
- Gray > Not animated
- Yellow > Keyframed on the current frame
- Green > Keyframed on a different frame
- Orange > Changed from the keyframed value
- Purple > Controlled by a driver
If an object is animated, you can find it in 3 places
As you can see in the below image, you can find whether the object is animated.
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| Animation |
- The first place is the timeline. It is highlighted in red color. If an object is animated, you will see a small orange rectangle shape in the timeline. You can read a detailed post about timeline in here.
- The second place is the menu you can see on the right side. It is highlighted in yellow color. If you can't see it, you can open this menu by pressing "N" on the keyboard. If an object is animated, you can see the above Blender colors in the location, rotation, and scale sections.
- The third place is this object properties in the properties tab. It is highlighted in blue color. It is also the same as the second place we discussed above.
Now we know what an animation is ?. so let's make our way a little bit further in this section.
Rigging
- When animating an object or character, rigging is the main term we should know. So rigging is adding controls to objects, to animate them.
- It is like controlling a puppet with strings. In here strings are the rigging.
- We may see the term " Rigging" as a small term. But it is a fundamental fact in animation. And has a lot of depth to cover.
- In Blender, when we are rigging we use one or more of the following things/ways to rig an object or objects.
Armatures
- An armature in Blender is like an armature of a real skeleton. Like a real skeleton, an armature can consist of many bones. These bones can be moved around and anything that they are attached to. This is like our body. Our body is moving with the help of skeletons.
Constraints
- Constraints are a way to control an object’s properties using either plain static values or another object, called “target”
Modifiers
- With modifiers, you can perform many effects automatically. That would otherwise be too difficult to do manually. You can add several modifiers to a single object to form the modifier properties.
- They can be added to the active object using the add modifier drop-down menu at the top of their properties tab. And apply a modifier if you wish to make its changes permanent.
Shape Keys
- Shape keys are used to deform objects into new shapes for animation. The most popular use cases for shape keys are in character facial animation, and tweaking and refining a skeletal rig.
- They are particularly useful for modeling organic soft parts and muscles. where there is a need for more control over the resulting shape than what can be achieved with a combination of rotation and scale.