keyframe manipulation

New question: Permitted operations and order of operations using keyframes.

  1. Is there a way to delete all the keyframes in an animation, and simply start over with everything in the original position/state/condition? I’m finding times that things have simply started out wrong, and I’d like to start over, but I don’t want to recreate the basic scene.

  2. When multiple changes of position or state occur in the same frame, must I select each in its turn, then to an “I” on each item? Or could I (should I) have selected them all at once, and done a single “I”?

  3. Having set one item’s change of position/state in a frame, and having said that the current frame is a key frame, could I/should I, when changing something else in the same frame, again set the current frame as a key frame? Perhaps what I’m trying to ask would be: is a frame a keyframe for everything changed in the frame - past or future - once it’s set as a key frame?

Gak! The English language is awful for trying to express some things! Of course, it couldn’t possibly be the person using the language. :wink:

Yay ! Questions I can answer !

  1. Yes. Select the object you want to edit (not in editmode). Near the top of the screen there’s a box saying something like “SCR:Screen.001”. Click and the hyphen next to that and select “screen” from the menu. This gives the keyframes displayed in an awkward sort of graph thing. Put the mouse over the new window, press A and then delete. Make sure you’ve scrolled back to frame 1 first.

  2. Not sure what you mean by this. You just set the objects postion/state/whatever in a keyframe how you’d like it to appear in that frame. Using “LocRotSize” covers everything. You don’t have to alter it’s rotation, size and position seperately, you can do them all at once.

  3. If you’ve changed something in a frame and set it, and THEN change something else, you must set the keyframe again or Blender won’t know you wanted to do that.

Hope this makes some kind of twisted sense…

I think I understand your answer to #1. When I did this, some of the objects for which I had (I thought) generated key frames appeared in the new window. Some did not. Those which did not were instances in which I selected several objects at once, moved them together, and pressed “I.” That leads me to my second question. Let’s see if I can rephrase it, so it makes more sense.

Suppose I have several things whose position or state I wish to change on a single frame. Can I select them all at once, press “I”, select “Rot/Loc/Size,” or whatever, and have keys generated for all at the same time? That’s what I’d attempted to do, but I’m not sure it worked.

Or, looking at it in the opposite direction, must I select and manipulate each object individually, then press “I” for each object in that frame?

I certainly understand your answer to question three. That’s what I suspected, but I wasn’t sure. Thanks for the help!

Selecting several items and changing the positions at the same time works on OS X so should work on the other os’s as well (adds ipo curves for all the selected items)