Blender : Animation effects By

Introduction-

Build

-Wave

-Particles

-Static

Blender offers a complete set of animation effects ready for use, only waiting for your creativity to bloom on your screen. We'll study here the use of the Build, Wave and Particles effects, in the ascending difficulty order, and give you many examples of use through full-length exercices. In any case, you can access these special effects by pressing the F7-KEY, or by clicking on the animation button . The following command buttons should then appear.

We'll pay special attention to the buttons on the right :  and . The other buttons will perhaps be studied in another tutorial.

Basics

All animation effects requires that you have a mesh on which they can act. Select the object you wish to animate (right click with the mouse) to make it appear in pink. Click now on the  button. A small box toggled 'on' should appear by the side of the  button. Don't pay attention to it for now, but know that it works almost the same way than the small buttons used for controlling the layers of your scene.

You should also see appearing, more on the right, a  button with the minus sign at its end. It is a scrolling menu.  Click and hold this button to see the animation effects available in Blender.

You can now choose Build, Particles or Waves, according to the effect you are looking for, and see that other buttons, which will be your effect parameters, appear in each case to tune your effects.
Please note also that, even if we'll not study this in this already promising tutorial, it is possible to assign many animation effects to the same objects, and that each of them appears as a small little box on the side of the  button. Click on the little box asociated to the effect you want to change. Beware ! When you click on the  button, you erase all the animation effects associated to the active little box, and loose all its parameters !