From BlenderWiki
Introduction to Animation
- This is a short description of what the manual covers.
Animation Tools
- Actions
- Actions are used to record the animation of objects and properties.
- Drivers
- Drivers are used to control and animate properties.
- Keying Sets
- Keying Sets are used to record a set of properties at the same time.
- Markers
- Markers are used to mark key points/events within an animation.
- Motion Paths
- Motion Paths are used to visualize an animation.
- Shape Keys
- Shape Keys are used to deform objects into new shapes.
Animation Editors
- Timeline
- The Timeline Editor is a quick editor to set and control the time frame.
- This also has some tools for animation.
- Graph Editor
- The Graph Editor is mostly used to edit the F-Curves and Keyframes for Channels and Drivers.
- Dope Sheet
- The Dopes Sheet contains a collection of animation editors.
- NLA Editor
- The NLA Editor is used to edit and blend Actions together.
Categories
- Modifiers
- Modifiers are automatic operations that affect an object in a non-destructive way.
- With modifiers, you can perform many effects automatically that would otherwise be tedious to do manually.
- Rigging
- Rigging is the process of attaching a skeleton to your character mesh object so you can deform and pose it in different ways.
- Constraints
- Constraints are a way of connecting transform properties (position, rotation and scale) between objects.
- Physical Simulation
- This category covers various advanced Blender effects, often used to simulate real physical phenomena.
- There is the Particle System for things like hair, grass, smoke, flocks.
- Soft Bodies are useful for everything that tends to bend, deform, in reaction to forces like gravity or wind.
- Rigid Bodies can simulate dynamic objects that are fairly rigid.
- Fluids, which include liquids and gasses, can be simulated, including Smoke.
- Force Fields can modify the behavior of simulations.
- Motion Tracking
- Motion tracking is a new technique available in Blender. It is still under development, and currently supports basic operations for 2D motion tracking, 3D motion tracking, and camera solution.
Animation
There are some more topics listed here: Manual - Animation
