Introduction
- Animation
  - State Colors
- Rigging
  - Examples

Introduction

Animation

Animation is making an object move or change shape over time. Objects can be animated in many ways:

Moving as a whole object

Changing their position, orientation or size in time;

Deforming them

Animating their vertices or control points;

Inherited animation

Causing the object to move based on the movement of another object (e.g. its parent, hook, armature, etc.).

In this chapter, we will cover the first two, but the basics given here are actually vital for understanding the following chapters as well.

Animation is typically achieved with the use of keyframes.

State Colors

State colors of properties.

Properties have different colors and menu items for different states.

Gray	Not animated
Yellow	Keyframed on the current frame
Green	Keyframed on a different frame
Orange	Changed from the keyframed value
Purple	Controlled by a driver

The changed value highlight currently doesn’t work with NLA.

Rigging

Rigging is a general term used for adding controls to objects, typically for the purpose of animation.

Rigging often involves using one or more of the following features:

Armatures

This allows mesh objects to have flexible joints and is often used for skeletal animation.

Constraints

To control the kinds of motions that make sense and add functionality to the rig.

Object Modifiers

Mesh deformation can be quite involved, there are multiple modifiers that help control this.

Shape Keys

To support different target shapes (such as facial expressions) to be controlled.

Drivers

So your rig can control many different values at once, as well as making some properties automatically update based on changes elsewhere.

Rigging can be as advanced as your project requires, rigs are effectively defining own user interface for the animator to use, without having to be concerned the underlying mechanisms.

Examples

An armature is often used with a modifier to deform a mesh for character animation.
A camera rig can be used instead of animating the camera object directly to simulate real-world camera rigs (with a boom arm, mounted on a rotating pedestal for example, effects such as camera jitter can be added too).