I have to do an animation project in Blender for school, and I have been having trouble with the keyframing interface.
How do I copy a keyframe? The animation is required to loop, so I started by putting keyframes in the first and last frame of the amount of time I want to use. Now, I want the animation to essentially stop for a few frames, but the objects are always moving back to their starting positions after any new frame. I figure the easiest way to get it to stop moving would be to copy the previous keyframe and repeat it a few frames later, but I can’t figure out how to copy a keyframe.
Also, while I’m posting, how do I delete a keyframe I don’t like without deleting every keyframe for that object?
The reason I ask, is that it might be easier to do with armatures, but even without them, you can have any “object” animation (IPO) “connected” to the Action editor, by clicking on the “LegLess Man” icon in the IPO editor (beside the IPO type dropdown (Object/Material/World/Shape/Constraint/Sequence). … Indicated by “1” in the attached picture. Once you do that, it’s easy to copy keyframes, by using the action editor. Each “dot” in the action editor represents a keyframe. You can select one or more keys there, and then use SH-D to duplicate them, “X” to delete, or grab and move key(s) like you would move objects in the 3d window (“b”(ox) select … RMB …etc. You can “scale” selected keys which if you have all keys selected for example, has the effect of speeding up or slowing down the animation.
For repeating the animation, go the IPO editor, with the Object selected, hover the mouse in the “curve area” of the window and press “A” to select all curves (might want to press HOME to see them all first) … All the keys should turn white.
Then from the Curve Menu / Extend Mode, chose Cyclic. **NOTE if you have the mouse cursor in the IPO window, hovering over the channel names (right border) when you press “A” you’ll toggle the visiblity instead of selecting all the curves.
Also make sure you’re in Curve mode not Point mode (toggled with the TAB key or Curve/(Point)/Edit Selected In Curve mode the keyframes in the IPO window are shown as black (non-selected) or white (selected), while in Point mode they are shown as pink/yellow for non-selected / selected.
Depending on what you’re animating, you might want to add an armature and parent your object(s) to bones in the armature (CTR-P parent to bone). The advantage is that if you parent each object to a bone, all of the bones are grouped under one action, making it much easier to time the animation. Otherwise you can optoinally use the NLA editor for indiviual Object actions, but that make it more complex than you probably need.
