Part 2, Basic Animation

Here's the model I'm gonna be animating! Were you expecting that blasted Leopard again?! Nope, I couldn't think of many ways to animate that. Whereas here on my Thunderbird 2 model I'm gonna aminate it lifting up on it's legs and the door of the pod dropping open. This is where this tutorial will vary from the rest, as you may not have a Thunderbird 2 model to animate I'll be telling you what I'm doing rather than telling you what to do. Then you can incorporate it into your own animation.

The first thing I'm gonna do is animate a leg as the body of the plane rises. I have simply made 4 cylinders inside eachother. Before the body rises, the first segment of the leg must touch the floor. So I click and drag the time slider to frame 20 and press the Animate button. Then I simply select the first leg segment and move it to the floor. You'll notice 2 blue blocks have appeared on the time scale. These are the animation keys for the selected object, and as I animated the leg moving to the floor RenX automatically placed position keys at Frame 0 and Frame 20, which state where the object started and finished. If the object is rotated these keys hold that information aswell. RenX will then automatically generate the animation between these keyframes.

So, the leg now goes down to the ground, but when I play the animation the leg is going down too fast. I want to make it slower. I select the key at frame 20 and it turns green (to show it's selected), I drag it to frame 30 and play it again. That looks much better. Now it's time for the body to lift up, starting from frame 30. I select the body and remaining segments and drag the slider to frame 40. With the animate button down again I lift them up until they reach the end of the first leg segment on the ground. Notice when I do this the start key is back at Frame 0. This needs to be dragged to frame 30. Previewing the animation the body lifts up faster than the leg was going down, so the key at frame 40 has to be moved aswel to slow down the body. I moved it to frame 50 and it looked ok. Now, deselecting the second leg segment I moved to frame 100 and moved the body and remaining leg segments up. Previewing the animation again it looks good, but I've run into a problem: I've run out of frames...

Proceed to Part 3