How to Animate in Blender

Animating in Blender is pretty straightforward, and this guide will show you how to achieve this.

Animation in Blender gets better with every new release and update, and you now have plenty of tools at your disposal.

In this Blender animation tutorial, we're going to walk you through your first keyframe—as well as mention a few extraordinarily useful tools, menus, and systems that you should be taking advantage of.

How to Animate in Blender

Start with your first keyframe pose. We're using a puppet with rigging built-in, but it's worth remembering that animation can be applied to any type of object and any type of deformation or translation. A "pose" can be as simple as the top of a box hinging open like a lid, for example.

Once you have your first pose, use the I key to prompt the Insert Keyframe menu. You can also add a new keyframe by way of the Auto Keyframe toggle, which will automatically create a new keyframe any time the keyframed property has changed.

You have many options here, and many of them are pretty self-explanatory. In this case, we're going to go with a simple Rotation keyframe, which will animate the difference in rotation between both of these positions on the timeline. Add a second keyframe to continue.

Now, hit the Spacebar. You should see your rudimentary little ditty playing out happily. This is only the first step when animating in Blender, though; from here, there are many ways that you may consider continuing.

If you're ambitious, part of the magic will lie in your ability to break an entire sequence down into chunks that you can tackle—once you have the foundation of your animation blocked out and working well on-screen, it's a lot easier to hop in and to make each moment your own. The more thought and secondary movement that you impart each flourish with, the more your animation is going to sing in playback.

Before you're there, though, you'll need to learn a few basic phrases.

Blender Animation Basics

Now that we know what basic animation in Blender looks like, here are a few key terms to familiarize yourself with moving forward:

• Armature: These are the "bones" that let you manipulate your puppet or object, deforming it predictably without worrying about the mesh losing character or integrity.
• Keyframe: Two unique places along the timeline where a given object or piece of geometry exists at two differing values. In the first keyframe, it's right here—and in the next, it's moved two feet to the right, with averaged, interpolated values between each position occupying the intermediary space.
• Key Pose: Somewhere "major" that your character should land; one key pose might be grabbing a glass of water, while the next might show them drawing it to their lips.
• Interpolation: The way that a keyframed value "ramps off" between each checkpoint; a keyframe might be constant, truly linear, quadratic, or determined through Bézier or linear interpolation.
• Constraint: These may add functionality to a rig or animation by containing the motion of an object to the path of a two-dimensional curve, to name one example.
• Parenting: This animation tool keeps your entire model together as you work with it—the limbs are parented to the body, and each hand and foot is parented to the extremity that it extends from.
• Inverse Kinematics: Once you have some bones in your model, you can use IK to make them behave more like a series of arm or leg segments as you move the wrist, hand, or foot.
• Paths: You can coordinate your character's motion by attaching them or a part of them to an animation path, usually some sort of curve.
• Drivers: These are automated means of control, values dependent on the state of your model elsewhere.

Animation can be applied to an object or character, but you can also animate non-object elements like cameras and lights, as well. The quality of your animation will have a lot to do with how you're able to fit all of these different pieces together.

When creating something like a scurrying insect, for example, you can use constraints and drivers to confine the stride of each leg to a perfect curve. It might sound like a terrible idea on paper, but it's important to remember that nearly all hierarchical movement is bound to the arc of the limb.

Even animating inanimate objects will become much easier with this knowledge in mind; think about the arc of a nunchaku as a person swings it around from one handle. Just like when you're first learning how to model with generic geometric primitives, you'll start to make these connections naturally, on an observational basis, the more that you practice and get your gears turning.

What Can You Do With Blender's Animation Tools?

The example above illustrates the simplest possible type of animation in Blender: keyframing one single parameter on a rigid model to do one thing exactly one time.

You'll typically animate in Blender through keyframes (or even scripts and other advanced tools if you have the know-how). Disregarding these, though, there are three major ways that objects and characters move in Blender:

• As a whole object
• Through local transformations and deformations
• Inherited action through armature or a handle

These three categories cover the "what" of your animation. The possibilities that Blender has to offer in regard to your "how" are actually much more extensive, however.

What else is out there? There is an entire world of deformation control, rigging, geometry nodes, texture nodes, vertex groups, and shape keys to explore. Before you can get there, however, you'll need to know your basics, lest things get very confusing very quickly. Navigation and management of each animation element will inevitably be paramount to any Blender workflow for animation.

There are tons of advanced features in Blender meant to emulate a traditional animation environment—you even have an actual Dope Sheet built right into the app, which is incredible for coordinating complex animation like speech to a script.

Blender's Graph Editor presents another major advantage—you can use it to modify the interpolation of each segment of keyframing, finessing timing, spacing, and speed intuitively. This allows you to improve the quality of your animation and to make movements feel more real and less robotic. You can even use Bézier handles to create custom ramps and easy ins or outs, just like you would in a program like After Effects.

Here, you can see that we've applied a pretty steep curve to the Lego Man's wave. You can't really tell through a photo alone, but try something similar within your own Blender project. After tinkering around, you'll start to see how easy it is to refine even very simple actions into rich, interesting, and deeply personal expressions.

The hard part is beginning. Once you have somebody bopping around on your canvas, though, you'll probably be able to think about a lot of things that they could be doing. Once the right inspiration hits you, getting down to business becomes nothing more than a matter of figuring out how to make it all possible.

What Most Blender Animation Tutorials Won't Tell You

There is no wrong way to animate in Blender—there are a million answers to every question. The difference between them all will end up being a matter of quality, efficiency, and time saved for the rest of the project.

When you first get started, we suggest trying it all. The best Blender animation workflow is the one that results in the coolest final result.