Play Back our Animation

We can play back the captured animation with the keys alt+a. You should see the motion of the cube play back on the screen and repeat continually. Press the escape key to stop the motion.

You can use the up arrow and the down arrow to move through the animation. Try moving to somewhere near frame 100 by pressing the up arrow key 10 times. Now on the top menu bar click "Render" and then select "Render Current Frame" from the drop down menu. Blender 3D will now render the single frame that you are looking at.

Touch up the Scene

Although the motion of the objects is "baked" into our file we can still make changes to other elements that do not move such as lights and cameras. We can also change the material on the moving objects, something that we will do in the next tutorial.

If the image looks a little dark you can add additional illumination to the scene. To add more light go to the top view. Select "View" -> "View All" to see all of the objects in the scene. The light for this scene is represented by a small circle with a smaller black circle inside it. The camera is represented by a symbol that looks similar to a wire outline of a pyramid. Pick a location where you want to put the light source and left click the mouse. Now press "spacebar" and select "Add"->"Lamp"->"Lamp" then press then left mouse button. Select the "Front" view to see how high the light is above the table. You can move the light higher in the scene with "G Z 2" (replace 2 with how high you want to raise the light).

Now select "Render" -> "Render Current Frame" to view the results of adding the new light source. Experiment moving the new light (or adding other lights) until the rendered frame looks good enough to continue.