Realizing 3D Animation in Blender

7

Basic Character Animation

This is an animation book, and it’s been two whole chapters since we inserted any keyframes! It’s time to get back to work and animate this character we’ve spent so long learning how to pose.

If you know how to animate objects and how to pose a character, you pretty much already know how to animate a character as well. In pose mode, armature bones have the same keyable properties as objects (Location, Rotation, and Scale), and we will use the same methods for keying those properties as before.

Character animation isn’t without its challenges, though! Our main challenges are two-fold: Firstly, our characters will look extra bad if animated poorly. Unconsciously, we know how people’s bodies ought to move; the eye is ...