Blender Basics

getting started with 3D animation in Blender

What is blender?

Blender is an industry standard but free 3D animation software

Moving the Camera

Let's start with how to move the camera, there are three main camera controls.

Snow and Rain

We are going to use either Snow v2 or Rain v2

These are both characters made by blender's animation studio, Studio Blender

Importing a character

Choose either Snow or Rain from the previous slide and download the file.

extract the file by right clicking and choosing 'unzip'

double click the snow.blend or rain.blend file to open it in blender

Pose Mode

We want to animate so we will need to pose our character.

You will need to select pose mode from the drop down menu at the top left.

Pose mode is only available when you select the character rig.

Move, Rotate, Scale

Once you have a part of the rig selected you can use the following commands:

Pressing x y or z while moving will move only in that axis, pressing shift and x, y or z will move in the other two axes

The Timeline

The timeline is used to keep track of keyframes that have been inserted, and to see the current frame (blue line)

• keyframes are displayed as a diamond
• keyframes that are the same are joined with a solid line
  
  
  

Inserting Keyframes

Pressing the i key will insert a keyframe on the current frame.

You will be asked what kind of keyframe you want to set.

Usually this will be location, rotation for a character, it's rare to change the scale of a character's rig.

Animating your character

Now you've got all the tools you need, to animate your character follow these steps:

1. Select a frame
2. Pose your character by moving the parts of the rig around and rotating
3. select all parts of the rig, and insert location rotation keyframes
4. choose a new frame and start again