In today’s video, we’re starting a series on how to create animations inside of Blender!

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In the first video, we’ll start by taking a look at the animation workspace and creating a very simple animation, We’ll then build on this in future videos.

Start by clicking on the tab for “animation.” This will take you into the animation workspace – 3 windows – there’s the modeling workspace, there’s the preview window, and the dope sheet.

Add a plane. Notice that the plane now shows up in your preview.

Now, let’s add a sphere.

Look at the bottom of the page – if you click on the play button, nothing happens. That’s because we haven’t actually added any kind of movement data to our animation yet.

Start by adding a keyframe. You can do this by tapping the “I” key on your keyboard. Notice it gives you a list of different things about your animation that you can include in your keyframe. In this situation, we’re going to add a keyframe for “location.” This will store your location data down in your dope sheet below.

Notice if you click on the “object transforms” dropdown, it will show you little dots for the information you’ve stored – in this case, it’s stored x, y, and z coordinate data.

Now, let’s set our time to 20 frames. Then, move your sphere and add another keyframe with the “I” key.

Notice now that your sphere moves between the two keyframes you set over the course of 20 frames.

If you click play it will animate, or you can click the slider to drag between the two.