The last panel we have in the window is the Animation Timeline. This timeline shows any animations you may have in your scene. Since we just created a new scene, we don’t have any animations on our object. But if we did, we would be able to see them by pressing “Play” and they would play on the object itself. It comes with pretty standard playback controls.
The timeline represents the animation in frames. As you will notice, Blender defaults animations to 24 frames per second, which is the industry standard for film. This setting can be changed in the Properties Panel > Output Properties > Format > Frame Rate. Once you find the setting, you can click on the dropdown menu and select anything else. For now though, we will just leave it in 24 fps.
To convert your timeline into seconds you just need to divide your frame between your frame rate. For example if you are in the frame #120 and are working at a 24 fps frame rate, this means that you’re in the 5th second of the animation. We will cover some basic object animation in this course, but anything like animating characters is just beyond the scope of a basics course.
All these Panels we’ve covered are all completely configurable. You can resize them by clicking and dragging through the space between both panels. And even create a new one by taking your cursor to the far top left corner until it transforms into a cross.
Just click and drag it into the Viewport and the view will multiply. You can change the function of this new window by clicking right on the Editor Type.
All these different panels we covered are part of the Layout Workspace. A workspace in Blender is just a pre-set configuration of panels designed to speed up your workflow.
Each time you save. The blender will show you the Scene just like you left it the last time you saved it. To save your scene, just go to File and then Save or Save As; Choose the file location and click “Save As”.
Every time you open a file location it will appear on your folder as a “.blend” object. A “.blend” file is a special extension that can only be opened by Blender.
Yay! you made it this far. We know you are anxious to start, but getting familiar with the UI is really important for learning Blender.
