Introduction

Animation is making an object move or change shape over time. Objects can be animated in many 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 (e.g. its parent, hook, armature, etc.).

In this chapter, we will cover the first two, but the basics given here are actually vital for understanding the following chapters as well.

Animation is typically achieved with the use of keyframes.

See also

Related Sections

The Rigging section, Physical Simulation and Motion Tracking.

State Colors

../_images/animation_introduction_state-colors.png

State colors of properties.

Properties have different colors and menu items for different states.

Gray Default
Yellow Keyframes
Green Animated
Purple Driver