Blender For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12

Animating Object Deformations

In This Chapter

• Becoming familiar with the Dope Sheet
• Using armatures for animations
• Animating quickly with the Non-Linear Animation Editor

Looking at the title of this chapter, you may find yourself wondering how this chapter is different from Chapter 10. Both chapters cover animation, but this chapter covers the cool things you can do in Blender if you're animating with a fully rigged mesh. Chapter 10 covers what is often referred to as object animation — that is, animating the attributes of a single object.

With an animation rig, you have more bits and pieces to manage, keep track of, and control. Managing all that additional complexity can be daunting if you have only the Outliner and the Graph Editor to work with. Fortunately, Blender offers a few more features that help make rigged character animation easier to wrap your head around.

Working with the Dope Sheet

So you have a rigged character that you want to animate. Awesome! Change your screen layout to the Animation layout (Ctrl+Ctrl+). After that, the first thing that you're probably going to want to do is change the primary 3D View to solid viewport shading (Z), change the Translate ...