Blender Underground

I am a complete newbie to blender and somewhat a newbie to 3d animation. I have gone through the 5 basic tutorials at blenderunderground.com I found that they were greatly helpful in understanding many aspects of blender. I am looking for a basic animation tutorial using blender and the IPO and would grealty appreciate it if someone could piont me in the right direction.

Bart

Hi Bart,

Well done for making it through the tutorials!

Before posting a link to the animation tutorial (don't worry, there are loads ), have you had a play yourself? If you've ever used a program like Flash, after effects or Director - in fact any frame-based animation program - you'[ll find the animation system for Blender very easy to pick up. At least the basic stuff anyway!

essentially, you move the timeline to where you'd like to add a keyframe. change the property of the object you're animating (eg. set the x rotation to 90). insert a key (in this example we'd insert a rotation key as that's the property we're animating). Rinse and repeat!

If you want to see how the ipo window works - add the keys I've mentioned above and then move to the animation workspace. select the object you animated and you should see bezier curves on a graph. these represent the objects keyed properties.

You can edit the bezier curves in the IPO window - this will affect the objects animation in the 3d window. with your mouse in the IPO window, hit tab to enter edit mode, then select a bezier curve. You can ctrl-click to add new points, or select points and shift them about like vertices.

If you don't fancy trawling through all that nonsense (I don't blame you ) here is a link to some tutorials from blenderartists.org

The ipo window is useful but not essential for basic animation. It only really comes into play when you want to key properties that aren't available through the "normal" ui.