# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/The Ways of the Animator

|nextText=Animation Editors
|previous=Basic Animation/Keyframing Introduction
|previousText=Introduction to Keyframing
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You have just seen how animation can be applied to most object property
values. In addition to this, Blender provides some specific features to
aid in animating movements of parts of objects:

-   Meshes can have *shape keys* defined for them. These give different
    positions to the vertices (though their number and
    *topology*---edge/face connections---cannot change). The amount of
    influence each shape key contributes to the shape can be
    continuously adjusted from nothing to 100%, and like other property
    values can be made to vary over time.
-   *Armatures* are specialized objects, consisting of rigid *bones*
    that can be connected by joints, and moved and rotated relative to
    each other to produce different poses, very much like the skeleton
    of a human or animal. Armatures do not appear in the final render,
    but a mesh can be *deformed* (i.e. have its shape changed) by an
    armature to bring lifelike movement to a character.
-   *Lattices* are another kind of specialized object that can also be
    used to deform a mesh. Like armatures, they do not appear in the
    final render. Unlike armatures, they lack rigid joints, and so
    produce more rubbery changes of shape, characteristic of creatures
    without bones, or perhaps for a cartoony effect.
-   Curve and surface objects can also have shape keys defined for them.
    And of course curves can be used to deform a mesh via the curve
    modifier.
-   You previously saw the usefulness of the Empty
    object in modifiers. But being an
    object with position, scale and rotation properties like any other,
    these properties can be animated for an Empty, too, with
    corresponding effects on those modifiers. Also if the Empty happens
    to be a parent of other objects, then
    those objects can be animated as a group, just by animating the
    Empty.

