yep she twirls.

Heh. Indeed. The next question is whether or not I can animate something beyond the camera! :2049:

Molly

if you apply a different pose at the end of your timeline (say 30th frame) you should get a nice body transition, then it is just a question of making a series of such movements... good start, Molly

Heh. I think it might be a bit more complicated to do well but at least I have a glimmer of how to go about it and I promise to try what you suggest and to mess with it more. I'm always learning even though I am without the least doubt a very old dog! >.<

As always, thank you for taking a bit of time for me, my dear!

Molly

Wonderful animation. I'm always happy to see animations, they always had something magic for me.
I think one reason the characters are rigged is to help animating their bones, thus making them "move", jump, dance, swim, etc.
You can either manually set the bones in place for each animation frame or just use a specialized file containing all that work as a data file. Same data file can be also gathered using - usually expensive - devices to save those movements as an animation data file. It also contains from start to end frame each position of each bone, mostly.. Depending on how often the character moves within a second, you may have from 12 frames per second to 24 fps or more. The more fps, the more images with different positions rendered. An athlete running very fast will usually need more frames per second, to smoothly capture as many moves as possible. This problem had the analog television, NTSC had 60 fps, PAL and SECAM tv had 50 fps, all had actually half the fps for real. To double the fps "interlaced" fields were used, odds/even fields so the eye would be tricked. It was hardware limitation of those times when you could never properly see clearly each move in a 100 metres run contest. There was no option to improve it. Later, modern television came with new improved devices allowing more fps, thus more details for fast moving targets. Digital TV does it as well, it is limited to the hardware player but it can reach few magnitude orders higher fps.
A slow walk don't need 60 fps to work, it can look nice even at 12 or 15 frames per second, less frames rendered, less time required. Each rendered frame in an animation is a "sample" image of that movement at a time, captured in a "frame". That is the frame-time, the more samples, the more details captured. Rendering a bullet would probably need tens of thousands frame per second in order to capture its high velocity. Running 10 m/sec captured on old tv, means an average 1 captured image for each 40 centimetres travelled, nothing inbetween was visible because that recording was limited to 25 true samples per second. You may want to run animation tests using the fastest rendering option. When happy, you can do the "final" render using a better or a photorealistic render engine.
This short video has definitely 5 Stars. I love it!

Heh. Well I don't know that it warrants 5 stars. =) All your helpful information does, though! Thank you for the extensive reply and helpful inspirations, Mariius!

Molly

Off to a good start. Animations are a whole different gig and a lot to learn. Be careful Miss Molly - you might be headed down a long and twisting path.:)

I can see animating a character rather than the camera is rather more complicated. I expect I will continue to mess with it some but I expect my main thrust will continue to be telling stories with a series of pictures. I really enjoy that!

As always, thanks for your very lovely comment, my dear!

Molly