How It Works
Animations act on mesh subgroups and allow position, rotation and scale to be keyframed over time. Commonly, they are used to move bones in a skinned mesh for animations such as 'walk' or 'run'.
Animations are normally created as a result of importing them from an animation package (e.g. Max will export animations). If you want to combine several animations for the same mesh, import them as separate mesh files, then use the Copy and Paste buttons to copy the animation from the separate meshes into a single one.
Click a property in the property list if you'd like to remove it. e.g. you could remove scale information.
Reference
This dialog allows you to animate the subgroups of a mesh over time. For user guide help on animation please see the online tutorials.
Animation - the animation you are editing. You can add, remove and rename animations with the controls beside the drop down list.
Duration - the amount of time the animation covers, from start to finish. You can change this with the '...' button.
Snap To - the granularity of time that you want to deal with. The space between each line in the timeline represents this period.
Auto play - this animation will begin as soon as the object is created.
Loop - if set, the animation will loop continuously.
The timeline window shows any keyframes that you have created as solid black rectangles. You can right click on these to perform relevant actions.
The red line shows the current time that you are editing. If you modify the object in the scene while this dialog is active, it will create keyframe data at the time where the red line is.
If you want to see or edit what a keyframe contains, click inside the black rectangle to select it.
The keyframe window has the following attributes...
Time - the selected time in the timeline window.
Property - a list of properties that have been keyframed at this time. You can select one or more of these to configure tweening or remove them.
You can remove keyframed properties by clicking the delete button to the right of the window, or delete groups of keyframes via the Edit menu.