Beginner Woes with Animation

Im a newcomer to blender, im consider myself pretty computer literate i just find myself getting gumed up on the blender quickstart tutorial.

Ive gotten to the section of the Blender2Manual_Quickstart.pdf were im trying to animate a ball moving across stage. Now keep in mind ive been fooling with this prog for about a day and a half.

It tells me to

Select the sphere, move your mouse cursor to the big 3D window (the top view), and press the GKEY to move it. Move it to the left and watch the camera view while so doing. The sphere should be outside the outer dotted line in the camera view. This dotted line denotes the area that will be rendered by Blender.

Now we’ll instruct Blender that this will be the initial position of the Sphere, Press IKEY and choose “LOC” from the appearing menu.

Blender will now remember this positioin, but we still have to tell it where the sphere should go. For that we need two pieces of information: the new position, and the time when the sphere should reach that position.

We already know how to do this for the location. The time we set with the ‘Frame Slider’ that is located in the header of the ButtonsWindow. It now is at frame one. Press UPARROW six times and look at the FrameSlider. It has advanced 60 frames. YOu can now move the Sphere to the final position that you want it to be, and insert a new keyframe with IKEY (again choose “LOC”)

Now move your mouse cursor over the camera view and press SHIFT-LEFTARROW to set the FrameSlider to the first frame, and then ALT-A. which will play the animation in the 3Dwindow as a preview. Depending on the speed of your computer, and the graphics card installed, you will get a real time preview of your animation.

Alright i typed this out because yall asked for info on my problem

heres the main problems.

1: i want to understand what the purpose of the LOC is
2: i think i understand what the frameslider is but it doesn’t have a up arrow if its the one i think. It has a left and right arrow. And i don’t see where it says “60” frames either.
3: After i move the main sphere and “LOC” it i render and i see no animation.

Im really confused here guys, i guess i need some direction. [/quote]

This is very basic stuff and you should familiarize yourself with the Blender interface alot more beore proceeding. Animation is also pretty advanced stuff and you might want to try stills at first. That said:

  1. Loc is location. You simply set the Loc where it is, move x amount of frames in the animation forward and set Loc again to tell blender where you want it to move. Then Blender will move the object from Loc to Loc in that amount of frames.

  2. When they say to hit the UP arrow, they mean to hit the up arrow on your keyboard, not on the interface. This advances the frames 10 times. The Frameslider will then reflect that.

  3. You need to render it for an animation. The Anim button in F10, you also need to read up on what format to use, how many frames it is etc.

Basically you need to familiarize yourself with the Blender interface alot more :slight_smile: And dont fear! There’s alot of fun to be had in the process. :smiley:

LOC stands for location and it fixes that with the Ikey

left and right up and down arrows on the keyboard move the current frame forward, back by 1’s or 10’s[/quote]

Ok you should be able to see the animation in the modeling window by doing Alt+a after doing Shift+back arrow to place the animation at frame one. You will not see an actual rendered animation until you actually render the animation and select play. You need to read up a little more with regard to the interface. Then it will make more sense. You are ahead of yourself. Be patient and do the the first learning steps first. You will be rewarded with success.

May I recommend http://www.d.umn.edu/~dhomich/training/basic_training.zip

It is very helpful

LOC stands for location. When you press the I key the options are something like LOC (location), ROT (rotation), SIZE (obvious), LOC,ROT (now obvious, same for the next one) etc. I inserts a keyframe “remembering” (in this case) the location of the object for that frame (1). If you advance 60 frames, move the object to a new position, and set a new keframe for the new location and animate it, blender will fill in the motion in between the two keyframes. In this case smoothly moving the sphere arcoss the stage over 60 frames (a little over 2 seconds). This is called interestingly enough “inbetweening” :slight_smile:

The frame slider is right in tha middle of the header of the buttons window and has a left and right arrow as you say. It also has a number in the middle of it. This is the current frame number. Clicking the arrows increments or decrements the number one at a time sliding back and forth with the mouse in the frame slider also increases or decreases the number. up and down arrows on your keyboard increment and decrement by 10. Bunch of different ways to work with this one actually.

As the tutorial explaines you don’t have to render it. You go to frame 1, place your cursor over the 3d window and press" ALT A" The animation will play right in the 3d window.Press ESC to stop it. If you want to render the animation you use the ANIM button (the the right of the render button). First you have to set your options up and select the start and end frames you want to render etc. but that is another tutorial…

Hope that makes it clearer.

remember you have to set a keyframe at the beginning and at the end positions. so, set a keyframe at the start position, advance a few frames, move the object, and set another keyframe. this will cause animation.

<grin> always was impatent, thanks for the direction. Normally i learn through default. You never can go wrong by experimenting. But Blender is so… different, its extremely difficult to get a handle on.

Again thanks for the direction and ill study over this tutorial of yours.

hehehe I am very much like that myself (with lot’s of patience mixed in). But on the other hand experimenting with your x configuration on linux can COOK the works :wink:

Blender is fantastically intuitive once you get the basic interface and hot key patterns down. You won’t regret taking the time.