I somewhat understand the basics of animating and have done some simple anims on basic objects. Now I have a complex mesh with many faces that I want to move around and interpolate but I can’t figure out how to animate it. As a better example, just say you take a sphere and extrude each face so they become like little tentacles, how can you animate them moving up and down on the z-axis? I don’t see grab/move in the keyframe list (I-KEY). When I go into the action editor (which i dont understand that much yet) I see grab/move under the key menu but I cant seem to make a grab/move keyframe…
Well, I think what you’re asking is how to animate mesh deformations, and if so, there are about a dozen different ways, including armature animation, lattices, shape keys, hooks, and several different modifiers.
There are tutorials for all of them on the Wiki, they are also mostly all at least touched on in my book Introducing Character Animation with Blender and most of them come up in Essential Blender also.
As for which one you want for this task, I think I’d need more information. But you may as well learn to do all of them, because they’re all important.
Thanks bugman, and that sound right… animating mesh deformations, that’s what I want to do. I guess I’ll have to somehow learn shape keys and stuff like that…
Thanks