Blender For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 11

Animating Objects

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using the Graph Editor

Putting constraints on objects and taking advantage of these constraints

Practicing with animation

I have to make a small admission: Animation is not easy. It’s time consuming, frustrating, tedious work where you often spend days, sometimes even weeks, working on what ends up to be a few seconds of finished animation. An enormous amount of work goes into animation. However, there’s something incredible about making an otherwise inanimate object move, tell a story, and communicate to an audience. Getting those moments when you have beautifully believable motion — life, in some ways — is a positively indescribable sensation that is, well, indescribably positive. Animation, and the process of creating animation, truly has my heart more than any other art form. It’s simply my favorite thing to do. It’s like playing with a sock puppet, except better because you don’t have to worry about wondering whether or not it’s been washed.

This chapter, as well as the rest of the chapters in Part 3, go pretty heavily into the technical details of creating animations using Blender. Blender is a great tool for the job. Beyond what ...