From the course: Animation Foundations: Fundamentals

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Understanding keys and keyframes

Understanding keys and keyframes

From the course: Animation Foundations: Fundamentals

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Understanding keys and keyframes

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Animation is about change. To animate something you have to change it over time. This change can be position, rotation, or scale. It can also be for other attributes such as color, transparency, or anything else that can be changed. To animate something you have to tell the software what is changing and how. This can be done through keys or key frames. A key is simply the position or state of something at a specific point in time. When you have more than one key, you define a change. This could be a change in position, to move something. Or it can be a change in rotation, scale or anything else. As you add more keys the animation becomes more complex. The software interpolates the object's position between the keys. This is called an in-between. When animating motion, the keys are usually set for the individual axes. You could set a key for X alone for a straight-line motion. When Y is added you get two-dimensional motion. If you're animating in a 3D package you can animate in Z as…

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