From BlenderWiki

Introduction

This chapter tries to gather all doc you need to know how to animate things in Blender. As this is a vast topic, the chapter’s going to be quite large…

What can be animated

You can animate nearly everything in Blender:

Object properties	Mainly, the location, rotation and scale of an object, plus a few physical settings.
Constraints	Rather than directly animating the objects’ properties, you can indirectly do it by controlling some of their constraints’ settings.
Shapes	The internal data of certain ObData datablocks (i.e. the vertices of meshes, and control points of curves/surfaces). Which actually allows you to animate the shapes of meshes/curves/surfaces…
Armature’s bones	The animation of the bones of an armature is done in the specific Pose mode, and offers you another, usually more easy way to deform objects’ shapes, and/or to control object’s properties.
Particle systems and fluid simulation	These physical simulations already produce animated stuff, but you can furthermore animate some of their settings, allowing you to modify their behavior along time.
Worlds, materials and textures	You can animate the colors of worlds or materials, the mapping of textures, etc.
Sequence	Some of the VSE strips’ properties are also animatable, like e.g. their opacity…

Chapter contents

In this chapter, we are going to talk about:

The Timeline window	This window type is mostly a “passive” one, inasmuch that you can’t do much in it. However, its very useful to time-navigate in your scene.
Markers	These are named elements that lay at a specific frame, and are shown in nearly all animation-related windows.
Animating in 3D Views	More precisely, the animation-related visualizations in the 3D Views.
Animation editors	These are Blender window types dedicated to the editing of all kind of animations.
Animation techniques	Here we will try to present you the main animation techniques available in Blender.

Before you go any further in this chapter

Blender’s internal time unit is the frame. Hence, you must set the framerate of your project (in the Format panel of the Scene context, Render sub-context, F10), before you do any animation (as a reminder, pictures: 24 fps; PAL: 25 fps; NTSC: 29.97 fps, or 30/1.001 in Blender’s notation).

If you change the framerate later, all your animations will be fasten/slowed down, and “scaling” them back to their right speed will quickly become a nightmare, even on a small project!