What are "visual" keys?

Support Basics & Interface
1

When animating stuff with keys, what are those visual things?

In the pop-up menu you get when you press I, it will show some options:

Loc
Rot
Scale

LocRot

Visual Rot
Visual something

I’m using 2.48a.

2

Each option is a different type of key frame. So if you want to rotate your object, you would use “Rot” keys.

Does that answer your question :eyebrowlift2:

3

No. I know what all other options are. But what the Visual ones are?

4

http://books.google.ca/books?id=OaAl4PdZs5EC&pg=RA1-PA218&lpg=RA1-PA218&dq=visual+key+blender&source=bl&ots=5YOIKMW8yI&sig=LvJmtcu96Ip86Sm8UA5TNTWxlnM&hl=en&ei=2jheSsKBJ4vmMfeK-L8C&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8

There’s a quick explanation.

5

I don’t get it. Visual coordinates == real coordinates. And blender is all about visual stuff. Visual models, visual animation… etc

6

Reading that page I see something about “explicit use with constraints”.

7

When you use constraints, your object ends up in a different spot than you moved or rotated it to.

For example, if you have a CubeA with a Copy Location to EmptyB:
You can set the location of CubeA to 1,1,1 but if EmptyB is at 2,1,3 then that is where CubeA shows up. When you set a Loc key for CubeA it will key its location to 1,1,1 (even though it will still appear at 2,1,3 because of the constraint).
If you set a VisualLoc key for CubeA it will key its location to 2,1,3.

While the constraint is active, there is no visible difference between the keys. But during interpolation it can look different and if you later get rid of the constraint it will look different.

I’m pretty sure that Visual keys are preferable in most cases.