From BlenderWiki
We just saw how to animate objects’ properties (location, rotation, scale, …). In this part, we are going to talk about animation of objects’ shapes.
There are many ways of achieving this, with various levels of complexity, abstraction, and power. But, as with objects, we can distinguish two main types:
- Shape keys are the “direct” shape animation technique using, as usual, Ipo curves. However, it does so in quite a specific way.
- “Indirect” animation gathers a bunch of different things, from the classical hooks or lattice, to more specific techniques, like modifiers…
- Nearly all techniques we are going to talk about apply to meshes. Most of them also handle curves, surfaces, and lattices. The other “shape” object types (mainly metas and texts) are less featured in shape animation.
- Armatures, which are indeed a very famous indirect shape animation technique, are tackled later on in this chapter.
