Object and Animation Basics - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 43

Figure 3.16 The Timeline window.

Figure 3.16 shows Blender's Timeline window, which you've
already seen in Chapter 2. Depending on the resolution of
your display, Blender shows a frame range of 0 to around 250,
a little more than ten seconds of time. If you'd like to see the
timeline displayed in seconds, you can hover the mouse over
that region and press Ctrl-T . When you do, you see a differ-
ent notation for time than you are probably used to seeing.
Along the bottom of the timeline, the numbers read 0+12,
1+00, 1+12, 2+00, 2+12, etc. The number before the plus
sign represents seconds. The digits after are the number of
frames at that point in time. It's a kind of funky decimal nota-
tion, except it uses a “+” instead of a “.”, and counts from 0
through 23 instead of 0 through 9 like regular numbers.

Your scene can appear in different states at different points
along the timeline. When you render an image for each frame,
then play them back in real time, you have animation.

Figure 3.17 The object keying menu.

Basic Keyframe Animation
Start a clean Blender scene with Ctrl-N . Use Shift-A to add a monkey. Jump to a top view with
Numpad-7 . You'll be in Perspective mode, but we're going to do this in Orthographic mode, so change
that view setting with Numpad-5 . This is easy stuff you've already done.

Using the G key, move Suzanne (the monkey) to the upper left area of the screen. The exact location
isn't important. With the mouse still over the 3D view, press the I key. A little menu appears, like the
one in Figure 3.17 . The I key and this menu let you set keyframes . Keyframes, often referred to simply
as “keys,” are Blender's way of storing the object's transformation at a certain point in time. Examining
Figure 3.17 , it's kind of obvious what kinds of keyframes you can set: location, rotation, and scale. There
are some other options in there like LocRot and LocRotScale, which are just convenient ways of setting
location, rotation, and scaling keys with one command. Ignore the ones tagged with “Visual” for now.
They don't become important until much later.

From this menu, select LocRot . We're going to move Suzanne and rotate her as well, and we want both
kinds of transformations to be recorded. A key for her current location and rotation has just been recorded
on frame 1. The current frame is indicated, as you know, by the location of the vertical green bar on the