#Blender animation how to#

If necessary, change the track axis and up axis.Select the empty as the target in the constraint's settings.

Go to the constraints tab in the properties panel.In the 3D viewport, press Shift+A and add an Empty object.To setup the camera so that it always looks at a certain object follow these steps: We can then either animate the target or leave it in place if we want the camera to look at a fixed point. If we want a specific rotation of the camera as we animate it through the scene, we can setup a target for the camera to look at. However, you may have noticed that the camera will rotate the shortest path between keyframes. In the introduction, we briefly touched on the fact that we can animate both the rotation and the location of the camera.

#Blender animation how to#

How to control where the camera is pointing during the animation? Just be careful not to play the animation and move something at the same time when auto key is active, or you will insert a lot of keyframes at once. Related content: Blender shape key basics guide

We can change values, like move and rotate the camera, and Blender will automatically insert keyframes whenever a value changes on the current frame. In the timeline there is a circle icon close to your play controls. To get a view of the animation, press zero on your numpad or the camera icon in the top right corner of the 3D viewport to go into the cameras point of view before you play the animation.Īnother way we can animate the camera using keyframes is by turning on auto keyframe. We can manipulate them to change the position of our keyframes using similar commands as when working in the 3D viewport. Related content: 5 cool camera tricks in Blender 2.80 These dots are yellow when selected and white while deselected. Then insert a new keyframe for our property.Īs we create more keyframes, a dot for each keyframe will appear in the timeline. Once we have the first keyframe set we need to move to a new frame later in the animation and change the keyframed value to something new. In case of the camera, we use the location and rotation properties that is shortened as LocRot in the Insert keyframe menu. Or we can animate almost any value in Blender by hovering the mouse over it and press 'I' to keyframe the current value for the current frame. We can either press 'I' to open the 'Insert keyframe menu' in the 3D viewport with our object selected to get a list of common values for our object to keyframe. Related content: How to move the camera in Blender

Let's look at some ways we can improve our basic setup and learn how we can animate the camera in different scenarios. These are the basics of animating the camera.

You can insert multiple keyframes following the instructions above.

To preview the animation, go back to the first keyframe on the timeline, press zero on the number pad to go into camera view and press play above the timeline.

Press I and insert a new LocRot keyframe.

Move and rotate the camera if you want both kinds of transformations in your animation.

Move the play head to the right along the timeline.

Choose LocRot to animate both the Rotation and the Location.

Select your camera and press I to insert a keyframe.

Set the play head in your timeline to the first frame.

To animate the camera in Blender, follow these steps:

This way we need only worry about animating a single object, the camera. A straightforward way to create a simple animation from your scene in Blender is to move the camera through it.