The Graph Editor
In the previous chapter, we created a rudimentary animation while limiting our keyframe editing to Blender’s Timeline. While this was necessary to keep things simple at first, we concealed some important animation workflows for the sake of brevity. For most animations, using only the Timeline would be very frustrating!
The next most important tool for 3D animation in Blender is the Graph Editor. In addition to doing almost anything the Timeline can do, the Graph Editor displays both the time and value of keyframes, along with the resulting animated property they affect, on a 2D graph.
To learn about the Graph Editor and what makes it so useful, we’ll put it to practice in this chapter by animating one of the most popular case studies in the animation industry – a bouncing ball.
For nearly a hundred years, the bouncing ball has been a well-known learning exercise in both 2D and 3D animation. If we want our bouncing ball to look realistic...
