 Keyframes are the foundation of animation. Even if you aren't familiar with animation, you've probably still heard of the word frames as in frames per second. Frames are basically just still images and the number of frames per second is how many still images are shown sequentially on screen per second. A sequence of frames creates a moving image. Keyframes are the most important, or key, frames in a moving image. And for an animation, these are set manually by a human animator. The keyframes are typically where the key poses of your characters lie. In other words, if someone was doing a run cycle, the keyframes would be most likely at the extreme points of the run cycle, as well as some important transitions between how the legs move relative to the rest of the body. So what do keyframes do for animation? Well, in digital animation, if you mark the key poses, the software can often interpolate or blend the frames in between so that you get a smooth movement between keyframes. This is also known as tweening, and keyframes are the foundation of animation because without them, the software would not know how to tween or how to move the character. I'm going to quickly demonstrate how to create and edit keyframes in Blender. Now, it's very important to know that keyframing works functionally the same for objects, bones, and you can even keyframe visibility, materials, and several other values. Before we begin, I want you to know that there are three keyframe editors. These are the graph editor, the dope sheet, and the timeline. All three of these have the ability to manipulate keyframes, and I will reference them here and there. But the timeline is what we'll be showing as the default screen has it at the bottom of the layout workspace. However, we'll go in depth about each of these editors in their own separate videos. The first thing we'll want to know is how to insert keyframes. There are several ways to do this, but it's simple enough. The first way is to simply select something and right click for a context menu, or right click directly on the value and see if it has the insert keyframe option. If so, that value can be keyframed. Let's take this rotation mode dropdown for example. As you can see, the value will turn yellow, meaning there is a keyframe on your current frame for that value. This will also create a visible keyframe in your dope sheet and timeline at your current frame, marked by the small yellow shapes. They should be yellow circles by default, but are sometimes squares or diamonds depending on your handle type. There are also typically diamonds in the timeline, but we'll get more into this in the dope sheet and timeline videos. For some things, such as objects and bones in the 3D viewport, you'll also see an additional menu pop up when you try to insert keyframes. For example, if we select our cube, you'll see a list of options that looks like this. I typically pick lock rot scale, as it'll insert a keyframe in all three transformation channels. But feel free to experiment and choose an option that's most appropriate for your situation. For hotkey users, simply select the object you want to keyframe or hover over the value you want to keyframe and press I as an insert to insert a keyframe in the same way. Another way to insert keyframes is with the auto keyframe feature. Enabling auto keyframe mode will actually automatically record changes and transformations we make to any object in our 3D scene and insert keyframes for us. It will also record changes in values that have been keyframed before. To test this out, I'm going to select a different object. In fact, let's add a monkey to our scene. And to set a keyframe for this monkey object on our current frame with the auto keyframe feature, we can go to our timeline and press this white circle record icon button. Now that auto keyframe is enabled, if we move or transform our monkey in some way in the viewport, you can see a keyframe being automatically generated here in our timeline and dope sheet. Now you may notice after inserting the first keyframe, transforming our object further doesn't seem to insert new keyframes. But the reality is it is changing the current keyframe, it's just replacing it. To insert a separate keyframe, we'll want to change our current frame first. So how do we move our current frame to a different position in the timeline? The current frame is indicated by this value here which you can edit manually like most values in Blender. But a few other ways is to left click drag the top of the timeline here or hold Alt and use the scroll wheel. For fine tuning, you can also press the left and right arrow keys. Anyways, for this, I'm going to just move to frame 20. Once we move to a later point in our timeline, let's set another keyframe by simply transforming our object again. I'm going to move it just a bit to the right. Now that we have more than one keyframe, we can see the automatic interpolation or tweening process that the software does for us to create animation. Let's drag our timeline back to the beginning and press the play button. For hockey users, you can press spacebar. Okay, now you can see our monkey is moving. What we're seeing here is the software taking our two keyframes and interpolating the transformation between the first location and the second location. This interpolation can be tweaked in the dope sheet or graph editor, but we'll talk about those in their own separate videos. For now, this is our masterpiece. But what if you want to delete keyframes? How do we do that? Well, to delete keyframes, you can simply use the timeline or dope sheet, select the keyframes you want to delete with left click and press the delete key. Alternatively, you can also navigate to the frame with that keyframe and right click for a context menu. Then select delete keyframe. Quick tip from the same menu, you can also click clear keyframes to delete all keyframes for that value. It's important to note, however, that the delete keyframes option is not available in the 3D viewport context menu, but you can still go to the object menu, go to animation and select delete keyframe from that menu. For hotkey users, you can select the object or hover over the value with the keyframe on the current frame and press alt I to delete keyframes in the same way. One more thing you'll want to know about keyframes is the ability to change keyframe type. This might sound advanced, but in reality, it just means keyframe color. This is used for organization of keyframes that are used for certain purposes. For example, you can mark your extreme pose keyframes by selecting them, right click in the timeline for a context menu, go to keyframe type and select extreme. This will give your selected keyframes the extreme pink keyframe color. Other colors include blue, orange and green. For hotkey users, you can hover over the timeline and press the R key to bring up the keyframe type menu. And those are the fundamentals of keyframes. I hope this gives you insight on how animation works and how to create your own animation in Blender. In the meantime, we'll be going over how to edit and manipulate keyframes in the dope sheet, the timeline and the graph editor in their separate videos.