Summary
After completing this exercise and getting your train moving, you might feel more like a mechanic or an engineer than an animator, but animation is a broad category that includes the logical construction of whole systems. The way that you build your scene and the relationships between objects and their properties can be just as important as all the keyframes in your animation channels.
The subjects we covered here may have seemed complicated, but there’s so much more to learn! All those different constraints, variable types, dependency chains, coordinate systems, Python expressions, driver F-curves... a mysterious cavern of logic and mathematics rumbles beneath all of these simple-looking “features.” If we strayed too far into the topic of rotation alone, we’d never come back to finish the rest of this book.
We’ll learn more about parents, constraints, and drivers when we put them to use in character animation in Part 2 of this book...