Animation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 193

On the Timeline window, enable the automatic keyframing “record” button. You're going to be setting hun-
dreds of keyframes. If you're using Auto or Targetless IK, some of the keys will be on bones that you didn't
even know needed keys, and it would ruin your animation to forget to key them by hand. Set the current
frame marker to about 10 frames before the beginning of the shot in the timeline.

Place the armature into Pose mode with Ctrl-Tab and build your initial pose. If you've followed the instruc-
tions in the rest of this topic, your character will almost certainly begin its life at the origin (0,0,0), unrotated.
This will probably not be ideal for a starting point for your shot. You can try to move the entire armature
into a good starting position in Object mode, but depending on how your character is rigged, this may or
may not wreak havoc with the model. Your best
bet is to create your character's initial position
entirely in pose mode. Use the character's master
bone in pose mode to position things properly
before moving on to pose-level refi nements.

When building a pose, it is often useful to tog-
gle the 3D workspace into full screen view with
Shift-Spacebar or Ctrl-Down Arrow , then
back again after you are fi nished. Doing so gives
you much more screen real estate for refi ning your
pose, as shown in Figure 11.9. Also in that fi gure,
you will notice that the transform manipulator has
been enabled. It has been set to show only rota-
tions and to work with Normal space on the win-
dow header. The rotation manipulator in Normal
mode is invaluable for creating poses because it
provides one-click access to rotations around each
of a bone's local axes.

Figure 11.9 Animating with the 3D workspace maximized

Working in the Action Editor

As you create poses, automatic keyframing will add
keys as they are needed. These keys appear as blocks
in the Action Editor, where they can be moved along
the timeline. Figure 11.10 shows the Action Editor for
a shot from The Beast. S elected keyframes are yellow.
Unselected keyframes are white. Keys can be selected
for manipulation through many of the normal Blender
selection methods: right mouse button, B key border
select, and the A key for select/deselect all. There are
also several selection methods that are unique to the
Action Editor.

Figure 11.10 The Action Editor full of keyframes