Understanding Basic Animation Concepts
Animation always involves some kind of changes over time. Your 3D objects can be animated in several ways:
- You can directly move the object as a whole, changing its position, orientation, or size over time.
- You can indirectly animate the object through inherited animation, causing the object to move based on the movement of another object (for example, its parent, an armature/bone, and so on).
- You can deform the object, animating its vertices.
Other things can be animated as well, including audio properties, material properties, and more.
Keyframes
When we introduced iTween to animate our turret in Unity, we introduced the notion of tweening. Tweening--or "interpolation," if you want to sound smart—is the process of transitioning between two values or states. With our turret, we interpolated the rotation (see how smart I sound?), but we could just as easily have tweened any other transformation, such...
