Summary
By displaying all our animated properties as line graphs, the Graph Editor exposes the truth about 3D animation – it’s all just a bunch of numbers. All the parameters in your scene and all the properties of every 3D object – they’re all numbers that change over time. You make some numbers be one thing on one frame, and then you make those same numbers be something else on another frame. Keep going until it doesn’t look terrible.
That’s it. That’s 3D animation. The end.
Well, maybe not exactly. We still have a whole book to fill on all those wonderful numbers, what they are, why we need them, where to find them, and how to make them do exactly what we want.
We’ve only just scratched the surface of what can be done with the Graph Editor. Those Bezier keyframes you saw, for instance... what might those be good for? Read on to see how we can directly sculpt the F-curves in our animations!
