Character Animation: The Fun Part - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 306

to be helpful to have keys set even for the bones that
haven't changed. This is because right now, we're
only blocking our animation—creating the extreme
poses that will eventually become our finished product.
We're going to be playing with timing in a moment,
and we want the entire pose captured and movable
in time.

To do this, set the current frame indicator back to
frame 36, where the wave-anticipation pose was
created. Use the A key to select all available bones in
the 3D view, then press the I key with the mouse
over the Dope Sheet. An Insert Keyframes menu
pops up, from which you should choose the Only
Selected Channels option. This inserts keyframes at
the location of the current frame indicator, for all
selected animation channels. Note that when you
select the bones in the 3D view, the corresponding
channels in the Dope Sheet are selected. What you've
done is add keyframes for the current transformation
of all control bones at frame 36. Repeat this process
on frame 48 to fully capture the extended wave pose.

Figure 11.15 The extreme position of the wave.

So now we have 48 frames of awesome animation
right? Right? Hit Alt-A to play it.

Yeah, it's not so good. If you're too embarrassed of your effort up to this point, you can just watch
the video called bad_first_animation.mpeg in the Web Bucket While the poses themselves looked fine, the
interpolation between them looks horrible. In fact, let's just eliminate the interpolation altogether and work
on the timing. In the Dope Sheet, use the A key to select everything. To remove the smooth interpola-
tion between keyframes, head down to the Key menu on the header, and select Interpolation Modes
> Constant . You can also access this operation from the Ctrl-T hotkey, but it's not one you'll use fre-
quently enough to need to memorize. Pressing the A key now shows each of the three poses you've
created so far, snapping into existence right on their keyframes. No interpolation. This might seem odd,
but it's actually a good way to set your poses and check your timing before you start to deal with
interpolation.

By setting the frame range to something like 1-75 on the timeline header, pressing Alt-A lets you watch
the animation over and over. Let it fill your eyeballs and try to determine how it would look better. When
I do this, it strikes me that perhaps the wait period between the first two poses is too long. To change it,
we need to select all of the keys on frame 36. RMB select one of them, then press the K key. This
command looks at the current key selection and selects all other keys on the same frame as the currently
selected ones. In this case, it just selects all keys on frame 36.