Blender Animation Tutorial - Beginner Basics - Keyframes

Blender animation tutorial on a beginner level. This will teach you the basics for creating your first blender animation using keyframes to animate an object. I will start by showing the 3 main types of objects transformations and will end showing how to set keyframes, mixing the different types of movement to create more complex animations.

Hello and welcome.

This tutorial will teach you the basics of animation in Blender.

I will use Suzanne's head to demonstrate it.

This rig will be used for another tutorial.

Select the object you want to animate.

I will show you the three basic types of transformations.

The first is translation.

Click and drag the pivot arrows to move the object.

The second is rotation.

Click and drag the pivot circles to rotate the object.

You can scale the object with the S key.

Press enter to finish scaling it.

Now, press the I key.

There are 3 main types of keyframes.

Location, rotation and scaling.

The LocRotScale sets all of them at the same time.

Now, I will select frame 18 in the timeline.

With the rotation tool selected, I will make Suzanne do a 360 degree flip.

Press I and add a rotation keyframe.

If I play it, you can see Suzanne is not doing the flip.

This is happening because the type of movement is set to Axis Angle.

It's interpolating the shortest path to reach the final state.

Let's change it to XYZ Euler.

Now, we have to set the keyframes again.

As you can see, it's finally rotating as it should.

Now, let's add some location movement.

The first frame already has a location keyframe.

We have a more complex movement now.

I will add another location keyframe in the middle, to make Suzanne jump.

Using keyframes, you can combine the three basic types of transformation to animate your objects.

In the next animation tutorial, I will show you how to animate rigged characters.

That's it for the basics.

I make tutorials almost every day.

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:)