Basic Keyframes in the Timeline

For our first animation in Blender, we will animate the default cube. It has to be good for something! This may seem painfully boring, but we must keep things simple at first, and even simple objects can tell a story. Ours will be a 5-second epic about a young cube that ventures eastward into the unknown, then turns around, returns home, and rests in the end, wizened by many frames of traveling.

This exercise will serve as an introduction to Blender’s Timeline, as well as keyframes, the building blocks of any animation. We’ll use keyframes to determine the location, rotation, and color of the cube at various points in time.

Whereas this chapter is intended for readers with zero knowledge of Blender’s animation system, you will need to have a little experience in Blender’s basic functionality. This includes navigating the 3D Viewport, editing numeric values, and selecting and moving objects in 3D space.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Navigating the Timeline
• Creating simple movement with keyframes
• Editing keyframes in the Timeline
• Animating nearly any property in Blender