Animating with the Animation Editor

Use the Animation editor to animate the media, axis, surface, light, camera, and other properties of every object in the scene.

To open the Animation editor and display the Action channels:

1. In Action, click Animation.

2. In the Animation menu, select Channel from the View box.

   The top-level folder in the hierarchy is the Scene, which provides the overall view of the animation. The Scene folder contains the Result Camera and folders of objects in the Action scene. Initially these are the media, motion blur, camera, axis, and image folders.

   If you add an object to the scene, the Animation editor adds a folder to the channel hierarchy for the new object. For example, if you add a light, a Light folder is added in the channel hierarchy.

Animation Editor Action folders

Camera

Animates the camera position and point of interest. It also contains channels for animating camera roll, field of view, and the near and far clipping planes.

When Free Camera is selected, the point of interest channels are replaced by rotation channels in the Animation editor.

Media

Animates media properties such as blur, crop, shadow softness. A Media folder is listed for each media in the scene.

Axis

Animates axis properties such as position, rotation, scaling, and shearing.

Image, Bilinear, Perspective, or Extended bicubic

Animates surface properties such as material, offset, and displacement. The Material folder contains a shininess channel and folders for the specular highlight, diffuse, and ambient lighting.

Shadow

Animates the shadow colour and shadow transparency.

Light

Animates light properties such as intensity, falloff, spread, position, rotation, and colour.

Most of the settings in the Animation menu are standard for all tools that support animation, but there are a few animation settings specific to Action, available from any Action menu (on the right side).

Auto Key button

Enable to set a keyframe automatically each time you change a value at any frame.

Set Key button

Click to set the current values for the selected channels in the current frame (when Auto Key is disabled).

Delete Key button

Click to delete the selected keyframe.