Doc:Manual/Animation/Basic/Deformation

From BlenderWiki

Animating an Object's location, rotation, scale are trivial animations. Animating its Material settings is a bit more conceptually challenging. So let's take it to the next level, shall we? With Blender, you can change, reshape, and deform your objects over time!

There are many ways of achieving this actually, with increasing levels of complexity. However, each level builds on one another and as usual, there are many ways to do it. Depending on how fancy you want to get and what you want to do, one approach may be preferable over another.

• Hooks use an Empty (or other object, but most commonly an empty) to pull at selected vertices of your mesh or curve or lattice or NURBS surface. You animate the location of the Hook to animate the deformation of your mesh. Hooks are modifiers and are discussed in the Modifer section of this manual.
• Relative Shape Keys change the location of some of the vertices of a mesh. Relative shape keys can be combined, sometimes called BlendShapes, because different shapes are blended together. For example, a face mesh can have one shape key to smile, and another to blink. Those two action can be combined so that it smiles and blinks at the same time.
• Absolute Shape Keys allow you to deform and change the entire mesh, "morphing" from one position to the next. (You can even add or subtract vertices over time.)
• Lattice Animation uses a lattice as a cage that uniformly squeezes or expands a mesh, like the event horizon in a black hole, or as a comical cartoon car screeching to a stop. You define shape keys for the Lattice, which in turn affects the target mesh as it moves through the lattice.

The latter method, Lattice Animation, brings up an interesting feature in Blender, in that one object can deform another. This feature has application especially to Bevel and Taper objects. These are curves that affect other objects, like meshes or text objects. Changing the shape of these curves over time, using shape keys, will cause other objects (the mesh, text, etc) to change shape as well.

Previous: Manual/Object Layer Animation Manual index Next: Manual/Shape Keys