Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Working with Animation Curves

In Blender, the fundamental way for controlling and creating animation is with animation curves called f-curves. F-curve is short for function curve, and it describes the change, or interpolation, between two key moments in an animated sequence.

To understand interpolation better, flash back to your grade-school math class for a second. Remember when you had to do graphing, or take the equation for some sort of line or curve and draw it out on paper? By drawing that line, you were interpolating between points. Don't worry though; I'm not going to make you do any of that. That's what we have Blender for. In fact, the following example shows the basic process of animating in Blender and should help explain things more clearly:

1. Start with Blender's default scene (Ctrl+NReload Start-Up File).
2. Select the default cube object and switch to the camera view (right-click, Numpad 0).
3. Split the 3D View vertically and change one of the new areas to the Graph Editor (Shift+F6).
4. In the 3D View, make sure that the default cube is selected and press ILocation.

   This step sets an initial location keyframe for the cube. I give a more detailed description of keyframes later in the chapter in the “Inserting keys” section. The important thing to notice is that the left region ...