Character Animation: The Fun Part - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 304

down by MMB dragging anywhere
within the workspace, or using the
mouse wheel over the channel names on
the left side of the screen.

Creating a New Pose,
or Animation
Let's make the kid give a wavy salute
type of thing before he starts to walk. To
begin this process, we'll need two addi-
tional poses. The first will have his hand
in the anticipatory phase of the wave,
perhaps almost touching his forehead.
The second will be the extreme pose of
the wave where the arm and hand are at
their furthest extension. The poses them-
selves will be built in the same fashion as
the original.

At this stage of animation, where you're
just building a series of poses, some
people prefer to set them at equal inter-
vals in time and adjust the timing later.
Personally, I prefer to start to work in
timing from the ground up. To do this,
just stand up and give a wave. If you've
watched the finished animation, you
know the kind that I ended up using. As
you perform this action several times,
count to yourself. See how long it actually takes. Not long, really. For the sake of argument, let's say that
we'll allow about a second and half between the standing pose and the wave anticipation, then execute
the actual wave itself in a half second. In frame terms, that means that we need to build the first new pose
around frame 36 and the next one 12 frames later.

Figure 11.12 The Dope Sheet holding your irst keys.

On the timeline, or even directly within the Dope Sheet, set
the current frame indicator to frame 36. Also on the timeline,
and this is very important, enable the red recording button
in the header. Figure 11.13 shows the control. This enables
automatic keyframing. Now, any bones that you move that
have been keyed before will automatically receive a keyframe
for their current transformation.

Figure 11.13 The automatic keyframing “record”
button.