Blender animation: how to animate, from the first keyframe to a character

Blender can animate almost anything that has a value: the location of an object, the angle of a door, the colour of a material, the focal length of a camera, the bones of a character. The principle never changes: keyframes linked by curves. This guide follows the order in which you learn: inserting keyframes on an object, organising them in the Timeline and the Dope Sheet, working on the curves in the Graph Editor, applying the principles of animation, then moving on to a character and checking the result. Output to a video file is covered separately, in the guide on how to render an animation in Blender.

The principle: keyframes and interpolation

A keyframe records the value of a property at a given moment. If a cube is at 3 metres at frame 1 and at 20 metres at frame 10, Blender works out its position for every frame in between on its own: this is interpolation. So you do not draw every frame as in traditional hand-drawn animation; you set the important moments and adjust how Blender gets from one to the next.

Time is counted in frames. The frame rate, set in Output Properties, Format panel, Frame Rate setting, says how many frames play per second. The frame range, set in the Timeline or in the Frame Range panel, runs from frame 1 to frame 250 by default. The duration is simple to work out: 250 frames at 30 frames per second give 8.3 seconds. Choose the frame rate before inserting your keyframes, because keyframes are stored by frame number.

The Animation workspace

By default, Blender offers an Animation tab at the top of the window. It brings together the 3D Viewport, a camera view, the Dope Sheet and the Timeline. Three editors are used to animate, and each has its own role:

First animation: making an object move

The example in the official manual is the right starting point: a cube that moves, rotates and changes size.

1. In the Timeline, put the playhead on frame 1.
2. Select the cube in Object Mode and press I in the 3D Viewport. Blender records the channels set in the preferences (Edit, Preferences, Animation, Default Key Channels): location, rotation and scale in the manual's example.
3. Go to frame 100.
4. Move the cube with G, rotate it with R, change its size with S.
5. Press I again.
6. Start playback with the Spacebar. If you have set the Spacebar to another action in the preferences, playback uses Shift+Space. Shift+Ctrl+Space plays the animation backwards.

To animate a single property, hover over it in a panel and press I, or right-click it and choose Insert Keyframe. This is how you animate the power of a light or the colour of a material. To delete the keyframes on the current frame, use Alt+I; to remove all the keyframes of the selected object, Shift+Alt+I. The K key opens the list of Keying Sets, groups of properties to animate together.

The round record button in the Timeline turns on Auto Keying: every move, rotation or scale then inserts a keyframe on the current frame, without pressing I. It is handy for setting poses one after another, and a trap if you forget it is on, because the slightest staging adjustment becomes a keyframe.

The Timeline: moving through time

The blue line in the Timeline is the playhead, which shows the current frame. The diamonds are keyframes. By default, the Timeline only shows the keyframes of the selected items; untick View, Only Show Selected to see them all. A click selects a keyframe, Shift and a click adds one to the selection, and you can drag a box to take several. G moves the selected keyframes in time, and S brings them closer together or spreads them apart relative to the playhead: it is the quickest way to speed up or slow down a whole action. Ctrl+T shows time in seconds and frames instead of frame numbers alone.

The Dope Sheet: setting the timing

The Dope Sheet takes up the idea of the exposure sheets used in hand-drawn animation, which showed when each drawing, each sound and each camera move came in. Each row is an animated property, each diamond a keyframe. A grey bar between two keyframes indicates a held pose (two identical keyframes), and a green line a segment that is not in Bézier interpolation.

The menu at the top left changes the mode: Action Editor for the actions of an object or a character, Shape Key Editor for shape keys, Grease Pencil for 2D drawing, Mask for compositing masks. You can also mark keyframes by type, Keyframe, Breakdown, Moving Hold, Extreme or Jitter: these colours do not change the calculation, they help you tell the main poses from the in-betweens as the animation gets denser.

The Graph Editor: curves, interpolation and handles

The Graph Editor shows each animated property as a curve: time on the horizontal axis, value on the vertical axis. Keyframes are points on the curve, and each one carries two handles that change its shape. A steep slope means a fast movement, a flat curve an object that is not moving. This is where the difference between a movement that looks alive and a mechanical one is made.

The T key (Key menu, Interpolation Mode) changes the interpolation of the selected keyframes:

The same menu offers ready-made curves, adjusted with the Easing option (Ctrl+E), and three dynamic effects, Back, Bounce and Elastic, which imitate an overshoot, a bounce or a spring. The V key changes the handle type:

• Auto Clamped: automatic, with no overshoot between two keyframes. The safe choice to start with.
• Automatic: automatic and smooth, but the curve can overshoot the value of the keyframes.
• Vector: automatic, straight segments, close to Linear interpolation.
• Aligned: manual, the two handles stay aligned to keep the curve smooth.
• Free: manual, each handle moves on its own, which allows a sharp change of direction.

The interpolation and handle type of new keyframes are set in Preferences, Animation section (Default Interpolation and Default Handles). To make an animation loop, the extrapolation settings of the Graph Editor are explained in the walk cycle guide.

The principles of animation applied to Blender

The twelve principles of animation were set out by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, Disney animators, in their book The Illusion of Life, published in 1981. They come from hand-drawn animation but apply unchanged in 3D. Four of them are enough to see a clear difference in your first shots:

• Timing. The number of frames given to an action sets its speed, and therefore the sense of weight. A heavy ball does not fall at the same pace as a ping-pong ball. In Blender, it is the spacing between keyframes, set in the Dope Sheet or with S in the Timeline.
• Slow in and slow out. A natural movement speeds up, then brakes. This is how Bézier interpolation behaves; with Linear, the object starts and stops dead.
• Anticipation. A small movement in the opposite direction prepares the action, like a jumper bending their knees. Add a keyframe a few frames before the main gesture, with a slightly opposite pose.
• Squash and stretch. A soft object squashes on impact and stretches with speed. To stay believable, the volume must remain roughly constant: if you stretch a ball to 1.3 on the Z axis, reduce X and Y towards 0.88.

Two other principles are easy to set up in Blender. Natural movements follow arcs: in Object Properties, the Motion Paths panel and its Calculate Path button draw the path of an object in the 3D Viewport, and a broken arc stands out at once. Soft parts keep moving when the body stops (follow through): offset their keyframes by a few frames in the Dope Sheet. To exaggerate speed on a specific frame, the smear frames guide shows the techniques animators use. The classic exercise to practise all this is still the bouncing ball: about ten keyframes, and then all the work is done in the Graph Editor.

Animating a character: armature and Pose Mode

A character is not animated vertex by vertex. You give it a skeleton, the armature, added with Add, Armature, and each of its bones deforms part of the mesh. To link the mesh to the skeleton, select the mesh, then the armature last, press Ctrl+P and choose Armature Deform, With Automatic Weights: Blender works out the influence of each bone from its distance to the vertices. The result often needs touching up in Weight Paint, but it is a quick starting point.

The armature has three modes. Edit Mode sets the rest position of the bones, Object Mode moves the whole armature, and Pose Mode is used to pose and animate each bone. With the armature selected, Ctrl+Tab switches between Object Mode and Pose Mode. Keyframes are then inserted as on an object: you select the bones, rotate them and press I. Inverse kinematics (IK) makes the work much simpler: you place the last bone of a chain, the hand or the foot, and the previous bones follow.

The T-pose guide explains the reference pose of a character, the tutorial on bone constraints (in French) details IK and the other rigging constraints, and the walk cycle: how to animate a walk guide applies all this to a looping walk. To start from captured movement rather than keyframes set by hand, see the tutorial on motion capture in Blender (in French). In 2D, frame-by-frame drawing is done with Grease Pencil.

Checking the animation: playback and Render Playblast

Playback in the 3D Viewport is enough to judge the poses. To judge the rhythm, you need a video that plays at the right speed. That is the job of the Render Playblast command in the View menu of the 3D Viewport: Blender renders each frame with the 3D Viewport's renderer and writes it to the output folder, with the resolution and file format set in Output Properties. Render Viewport Preview does the same for the current frame, and Render Playblast on Keyframes only renders the frames that carry a keyframe, which gives a preview of the blocking.

This preview render works with Workbench (Solid mode) and EEVEE (Material Preview mode), not with Cycles. Switch to camera view with Numpad 0 to frame the shot like the final render, and turn off the overlays so that bones and helper objects do not show in the preview.

Once the animation is approved, the final render is started with Render Animation (Ctrl+F12). The choice of engine and settings is covered in the guide on how to render in Blender, and output as an image sequence, then as an MP4, in the guide on how to render an animation in Blender.

Common mistakes

• Keyframes inserted by accident: Auto Keying was left on. Turn off the record button in the Timeline when you adjust the staging.
• A jerky or jumping movement: keyframes still in Constant interpolation after blocking. Select them in the Graph Editor, press T, then choose Bézier.
• An object that overshoots its position before stopping: Automatic handles. Switch them to Auto Clamped with V.
• An animation that is too fast or too slow afterwards: the frame rate was changed after the keyframes were inserted. Keyframes stay on their frame numbers, so it is the duration that changes.
• A preview that will not start in Cycles: Render Playblast only works with Workbench and EEVEE. Make the preview in one of them, then go back to Cycles for the final render.

To fit animation into a wider way of learning Blender, see the path in the guide to learning Blender for free, and for the keys mentioned here, the Blender shortcuts guide.