Chapter 8. ANIMATED EFFECTS

Blender has several facilities for adding animated effects to your composition; these facilities fall into two broad categories: manually established and automatically computed. The manual animation system in Blender uses interpolated curves that establish certain property values at certain keyframes. In Blender, you key the starting property of something (such as the location of the camera), move in time, change the property to a new value, and then key the ending property. Blender then creates a curve to connect them. Blender also contains a very advanced simulation engine that can automatically compute the location of an object (and even thousands of objects) and can be used for compositing smoke, fire, and even flocks of birds, examples of which you will walk through in this chapter.