Animations

The hotkey i inserts keyframes. It does not have the same menu when pressed over the layout view or over the timeline.

It's possible to use g to grab a keyframe or selection of keyframes and move them along the timeline.

Same works for SHIFT + D to duplicate keyframes and SHIFT + S to scale a selection of keyframes. The ; key changes the pivot point just as it does in the layout views.

Children inherit the animations of their parents but can have animations of their own.

It's good practice to do all the parenting before animating as parenting on an animated object is error-prone.

You can activate the RECORD button in the timeline to automatically key anything moving in the 3D scene on different frames.

Take care to set a keyframe by grabbing and letting go of an object at specific times. Same goes for shader properties which need a keyframe inserted to start auto-keying.

Take care to remove auto-keying before moving objects/cameras/lights in the scene as they will trigger keyframes even if it wasn't intended.

Under the keying menu of the timeline you can set Active Keying set to scale, rotation etc. And then select in the menu next to the auto-record button the Only Active Key set option to key specific properties quickly.

In the Animation default layout it's handy to have two dope sheets, one displaying the keyframes and the other displaying the Graph Editor.

CTRL + MIDDLE MOUSE CLICK & DRAG to zoom in/out of the Dope sheet.

SHIFT + MIDDLE MOUSE CLICK & DRAG to pan the view in the dope sheet.

CTRL + TAB : Toggle between Graph Editor and Dope Sheet.

SHIFT + H : Highlight selected channel, hiding all unselected ones.

In the Graph Editor it's easy to see any properties that have been keyed but are not required (flat lines) and can be removed for more clarity.

You can use G to grab in the Graph Editor and clamp to X/Y (axes local to graph) to move keyframes around to modify positions of objects in those keyframes. Use CTRL for snapping.

Scaling in the Graph Editor produces different results as scaling in the Dope Sheet as it will also scale the curves. Best is to scale along the 2D Cursor represented by the playhead and a horizontal bar.

When selecting an armature, under Data > Viewport Display you can select Axes to display the local axes to each bone.

It's easier to see which axes should be animated.

In Forward Kinematics only the top bone can move and all the others just rotate around their respective joints. You have to move down the hierarchy to animate the rig.

With some rigs (e.g. a leg jumping), it can get tedious to have to respect this hierarchy top to bot, especially if once the animation is roughly cut out we need to make adjustments on the positioning of bones lower in the hierarchy.

This is where it's better to use Inverse Kinematic rig comes in handy.

To set it up, in Edit mode add a bone as a controller somewhere in the chain to control the rest of the rig and clear it's parenting.

Then in Pose mode, select the bone immediately connected to it and under Bone Constraints add an Inverse Kinematics.

Select the Armature as the Target and the Controller bone as the Bone.

Then set a pole to control where the rig is pointing at.

In Edit mode add a bone, clear it's parenting and move it out of the rig.

Then using the same bone with the bone constraint select the Armature as Pole and the Pole bone as Bone.

For a leg, the pole would typically be in front of the knee (facing the leg) while for an arm, the pole would typically be behind the elbow.

In the example of the leg, you might need to disconnect the foot from the lower leg part, but still have the foot copy the location of the leg when it moves.

In this case, clear the parenting of the foot to the rest of the chain and select the first foot bone and copy the location of the lower leg bone.

Same as above, set the Aramture as Target and the Lower leg bone as Bone.

Use the Head/Tail slider to select where on the bone it should be attached.

For an arm, the hand would usually stand in line with the forearm so disconnecting the hand might not be a good idea.

In some cases, it can be useful to constrain the rotation of the IK rig to rotate on only one axis.

This can be done by selecting the bone with the IK modifier and under the Bone properties > Inverse Kinematic constrain to the desired axes.