Day 1- Arm animation

What I did today:
Today I started my first project which is just an arm moving in a twisting motion with the fingers closing into a fist. I started with this to start small with the animations I do to first get really good at . small animations and then progress to larger ones.

I started by finding a model online of an arm that already had a rig built into it. A rig is pretty much the bones of any model and these rigs have points that help move the model.

I found the model I used on free3d.com which already had a pretty good rig built into it.

This is what the arm looked like in the Blender viewport, the gray triangles are the rig and each triangle acts as a "bone" that when moved moves that section of the arm. The tab at the bottom with the numbers is a timeline to add keyframes for animating, which I'll be using a lot. I'll also be using another form of the timeline which is a dopesheet which is just a more simple version of the timeline.

I used this video of my own arm as the movement I wanted as the bases of this animation.

To start moving the arm and its rig I first moved into pose mode which is specifically for moving around the bones in a rig. Object mode is more for just adding in different objects and viewing what your making.  Edit mode which I won't be using for this project is for editing objects for example: to extend a cube to make it longer or to make new shapes with existing ones. Edit mode is used more for modeling which isn' something I'm doing for this month so I probably won't be using it much, if at all.

The final thing I did for today was to set a starting position for the arm and then create keyframes at the start and end of the animation with the arm in the same position at both end and start. I did this because I'm going to make the animation loop. By having keyframes of the same position at the start and end this lets the animation seamlessly loop without jumps. Also to make sure all parts of the rig keyframe at the end and the start I have to select all of the parts and keyframe them together so that there isn't a rogue piece. I made the project 150 frames for now just as a good starting, and if needed later on I can extend or cut how many frames I want. 

What I'll do tomorrow:

Tomorrow I'll be finding the points that I want to use as the "checkpoints" in the animation. These checkpoints give the animation the basic movements for the full animation. For example, the first checkpoint will probably be the arm lifting up. The checkpoints will be starting points and after them, I'll be focused on the smaller movements like the smaller wrist movements and finger movements.