Blender All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 2

Adding Controls to Your Scene

IN THIS CHAPTER

Putting constraints on objects and taking advantage of these constraints

Getting more control over constrained behavior using drivers

Occasionally, I get into conversations with people who assume that because there’s a computer involved, good CG animation takes less time to make than traditional animation. In most cases, this assumption isn’t true. High-quality work takes roughly the same amount of time, regardless of the tool. The time is just spent in different places. Whereas in traditional animation, a large portion of the time is spent drawing the in-between frames, CG animation lets the computer handle that detail. However, traditional animators don’t have to worry as much about optimizing for render times, tweaking and re-tweaking simulated effects, or modeling, texturing, and rigging characters.

That said, computer animation does give you the opportunity to cut corners in places and make your life as an animator much simpler. For instance, with computer animation, you have the ability to automate the behavior of one part of your animation relative to the movement of another part. As an example, say that you have a pair of wheels and you need to animate their rotations. Rather than go through the process of setting ...