Depending on how complicated your scene is, this may take some time. Scroll back up to the top and in the Render Panel click the Animation button your scene will render to disk. We'll cover the rendering side of things in a future article. Now when the object moves fast it will blur as it would in a real camera.ĭon't worry so much about what all these things mean for now. Scroll down to the sampled motion blur panel and check the box to turn it on, turn the motion samples up to 5 and the shutter duration to 1.0. We chose Quicktime and H264 as the codec.įinally, let's add a little motion blur to make the output look a bit more realistic. Scroll down to the output tab and click the little folder button next to where it says /tmp/ and give the file you will render a location and name.Ĭhoose a file type either AVI or MOV are good choices. 24 fps is for film (or at least film look). Change the framerate to either 25fps or 30fps. Scroll down to the 'Dimensions' panel and choose 'HDTV 720p' from the drop-down menu. The little camera button is the display and render properties. The row of buttons contains all the properties and controls for the program. On the right of the screen is the control panel. The cube zips about the screen hitting all the keyframes you set in order and fast enough to get there in time no matter how many laws of physics it has to break to get there. Now press Play on the transport controls. Then press 'I' to make another 'Location' keyframe as before.Įach time you make a keyframe, you insert a little yellow line on the timeline indicating the presence of a keyframe. Remember you can move it up and down as well as side to side just drag the blue arrow. Drag the green cursor on the timeline to around frame 75 and then move the cube around to another spot. You can even go back and insert a keyframe between ones you have already set. Repeat the process at frame 50 and finally at frame 100. Now slide the green timeline cursor to a frame about a quarter of the way through, around 25.

Press the 'I' key and choose 'Location' from the popup menu.

Drag the cube somewhere in the frame either freehand or using the axis arrows. Change the scene length to about 100 frames.Ĭlick the 'Go to first frame' button to make sure you are at the start on frame 1.

But as with everything in Blender if you don't know where it is, you can't find it. In Blender, setting keyframes is very easy. There are other things you can keyframe in Blender (almost everything in fact), but let's stick to movement for now. Note: The things you can keyframe on any frame are positioned in the X, Y or Z axis, and rotation around those axes, or combinations of the three. On the next frame, it moves the object towards the next keyframe aiming, as it goes through the frames rendering each in turn, to end up on frame 100 with the object positioned as you specified for the last keyframe. When you render, the software puts the object in the position you set for the first keyframe, renders an image, and then goes to the next frame. You set up the position of the cube object in the first frame (frame 1) and then choose another frame of the animation (say frame 100) and then move the cube to another position. You slide a cube across a plane.Īnimation in computers is done with keyframes. This means you don't have to set each position manually by hand like they did (and in some cases still do) in traditional animation. To make an object move in Blender, you need to set a start point and an end point to the move, and then all the points between the start and end are 'in-betweened' or calculated. Then by taking this series of these images and showing them on screen one after the other at twenty-five to thirty frames per second (fps), you get the illusion of movement. In a broad sense, animation is a process of making individual images. We'll come to the rendering part in a second, but let's first look at animation. Once you've learned to model, texture and light your objects in Blender, you need to render them as some kind of still or animation.

First blender animation