Getting to Grips with Keying Sets, and the Action Editor

If you're an animator, one of the first things you'll be wanting to do in Blender after finding your way around the interface is get stuff moving. Therefore, i'll leave the intricacies of armatures until another time (or alternatively, you can watch this handy CGMasters crash-course)

The Timeline: negative frames, and key manipulation.

You'll find the timeline in the header dropdown menu (as discussed in previous tutorials) or you can simply go to the Animation Preset in the Screen-Layout drop-down (in the Info bar):

From Blender Stuff

NB: About Visual LocRot: as i understand it, this records the object's absolute position in the scene (ie: irrespective of constraints, parenting etc). It sounds really handy, tho i've yet to use it successfully so if anyone has any tutorials please post em!

To set some keys on the default cube in the scene:

~ select cube in Object mode

~ press keyboard shortcut [i] (taking care to have your mouse within the 3D view - cos remember, Blender Windows are context sensitive) ('i' is for 'insert keyframe' - nice and easy to remember)

~ pick the properties you wish to keyframe from the pop-up menu.[LocRotScale is my usual choice, as a good 'catch all']

From Blender Stuff

~ Move thru timeline animating cube and repeating as desired.

Now if you're coming from Max, you may have already noticed a couple of things that make you panic.

1) you can't scroll thru negative frames on the timeline

2) you can't manipulate keys directly on the timeline.

Regarding negative frames: YOU CAN! You just need to enable this in User Prefs.

User Prefs -> Editing Tab -> enable Allow Negative Frames.

You will also find a bunch of other useful animation options here, which you can your mouse hover over for further explanation)

From Blender Stuff

And the timeline? eh - who needs it when you can just use Blender's Dopesheet. Infact, I usually change my layout so my dopesheet is in a long strip like a second timeline. The second thing I do is switch on the Dopesheet's mightily helpful 'Summary' button, as illustrated below. This will control all keyframes on tht frame with a single key.

From Blender Stuff

Next up: More dopesheeting, and the Action Editor...