Now you've got your armature, but it's not much use until you add some more bones to it. Think about your body for a moment -- you've got this thing you call a 'skeleton', which for our purposes corresponds more or less to an armature object. Read on, for more useful information!
Shape keys are modifications of the original mesh that you can animate and mix with each other. Previously called Relative Vertex Keys (RVK), one of their major uses is to create facial expressions.
A constraint is what makes everything easier, magic, automatic, customized (add more words here) in a rig. It tells a bone or an object to do something special based on the position of another object, and the position of the constrained object itself. There are many constraint types for you to play with. Most will work everywhere but, the IK solver will only be available in the Armature Editmode or Posemode.
In this section, you are going to learn a variety of ways to make menus with motions. These menus can be used in more ways than the simple pop-Up menus, such as in-game if you need to select something you can use this to bring up a menu smoothly. In this section there is heavy use of Properties, "Property" Logic Blocks, and especially IPO usage. When you do it once, it will be very much easier to do it again.
The smoke simulation system within Blender 2.5 has recently received a huge amount of attention from both developers and users alike.
As the builds continue, a lot of things have been fixed or improved, and there are also some exciting new features! In this brand-new series we will introduce almost all of these features in a single project – creating a candle with a volumetric flame.