Came here again after reading about the dopesheet in a book about traditional animation. I read the title "X-sheet" also known as the "dopesheet" and then I immediately thought: "I already heard this term somewhere, but where!?"..."Owh, yeah, it's right in Blender as an editor!"; and now that I know what it was used for originally it makes perfectly sense in Blender too and I can clearly see how powerful it is and how computers can "simplify" animation.
Video and audio pacing are totally different. This audio is filled with tons of extraneous information. The Dope Sheet in Blender is a bird's eye view of everything happening in your scene. It shows you all keyframes for all objects and animations in your scene. It is an essential tool for managing and manipulating keyframes, timing, and general animation management. 1 - Accessing the Dope Sheet: In your default Blender layout, look for the timeline at the bottom of your screen. You can change this to the Dope Sheet by clicking on the drop-down menu that currently says 'Timeline', and selecting 'Dope Sheet' from the list. 2 - Understanding the Dope Sheet: The Dope Sheet displays keyframes as small diamonds along a timeline (horizontally) for each object and each animatable property (vertically). You can see the name of the object and its properties on the left side, and the frame numbers along the top. 3 - Adding Keyframes: To add a keyframe to an object, go to the frame where you want the keyframe, move the object or change the property that you want to animate, then press 'I' on your keyboard. This will bring up a menu where you can select what type of keyframe to add (for example, location, rotation, scale, etc.). The keyframes will appear as small diamonds in the Dope Sheet. 4 - Editing Keyframes: In the Dope Sheet, you can select keyframes and move them around, or even delete them. To select a keyframe, right-click on it. You can hold Shift to select multiple keyframes. To move a keyframe, drag it left or right while it's selected. To delete a keyframe, press 'X' or 'Delete' on your keyboard. 5 - Switch to Action Editor: To animate different actions separately (e.g., walking, running, jumping), you can use the Dope Sheet’s Action Editor mode. You can switch to this mode using the dropdown menu that says 'Dope Sheet' at the bottom of the Dope Sheet window.
Selecting Keyframes: Left-click a keyframe to select it. To select multiple keyframes, hold down the Shift key while clicking. You can also click and drag to create a selection box around multiple keyframes. The 'A' key can be used to select or deselect all keyframes, and the 'B' key allows you to draw a selection box. Moving Keyframes: With a keyframe or set of keyframes selected, you can click and drag them left or right to adjust the timing of your animation. Alternatively, you can use the 'G' key (for "grab") to move the selected keyframes. Deleting Keyframes: Selected keyframes can be deleted by pressing the Delete or X key. Scaling Keyframes: To change the speed of your animation by scaling the keyframes, press 'S' and then move the mouse. This scales your selected keyframes around the current frame, effectively speeding up or slowing down the animation. Copying and Pasting Keyframes: Duplicate a set of keyframes by selecting them, pressing Ctrl+C to copy, and then Ctrl+V to paste. The pasted keyframes will appear at the current frame, so remember to move to the desired frame before pasting. Filtering the Dope Sheet: Each object and their animatable properties are listed on the left of the Dope Sheet. Click on the arrow next to each object to expand or collapse the view of its properties. You can use the eye icon to hide or unhide channels, or the arrow icon to lock or unlock them. Grouping Keyframes: You can group keyframes in the Dope Sheet using markers. Press 'M' to create a marker at the current frame, then select the keyframes and the marker, right-click the marker and select "Bind to markers". The keyframes will now move with the marker. Dope Sheet Summary: At the top of the dope sheet, there's an entry called "Summary". This shows all the keyframes in the scene as if they were one set. This can be helpful for selecting and moving all keyframes at once. Switching to Action Editor: In the Dope Sheet, you can switch to the Action Editor mode using the dropdown menu in the header. This allows you to manage different animations for a single object, each animation being represented as an "Action". Relevant menu's : View: Controls the view in the Dope Sheet. Select: Contains options for selecting keyframes. Marker: Options for adding, deleting and managing markers. Channel: Operations for channels, such as visibility, locking, grouping, and more. Key: Operations for keyframes, such as copying, pasting, duplicating, etc.
It comes from traditional hand-drawn animation where they used a graph paper to do pretty much the same thing (also called an 'exposure sheet'). Traditional animation took that phrase from horse racing, where they used a sheet filled with information about the horses in the race: their weight, jockey, past performances etc... So why did _they_ call it 'dope' sheet? Because it carried a 'sense of inside information from knowing before the race which horse had been drugged to influence performance', as in 'doped'. Pretty cute story.
Hello Blender Team, is there any way of synchronizing Timeline Playback Preview for different scenes? Also based on this video, and my experience I think the new feature is required for the SHOWING OPTIONS: [Selected,/All], [Visible/Invisible], [OnlyShowErrors]... now a new option should be for INCLUDING COLLECTION ON or COLLECTIONS OFF, especially when you want to manipulate the global scene with many collections and you don't want to switch them all ON or OFF for only that reason.
Hi , can u pl clarify my doubt.. I have 7 cubes animated in rotation X. i want to make time dilation for each. Means each will have different timing. I selected the all 7 cubes in camera view and opened dopesheet. When i selected the cube2's key, all other Cubes's keys are getting selected. can you tell me, how to select only one cube's key amongst all other cubes in dopesheet ??
Good question. I couldn't find a way to move a channel to an existing group. But I found out that if you select all of the channels in the designated group and the channel you want to add to that group, then press Ctrl + G (or use the Channel menu to group them) they will all be in the same group (again). You will have to rename the group though. If you use the same name, it will get an ".001" appended (in my case, using Blender 4.0). You can rename the group afterwards again, since the original one will be replaced, and thereby remove the ".001". You can easily select multiple channels at once, e.g., if you click on the top (or bottom) one, hold shift, then click on the bottom (or top) one. All channels in between those two will get selected as well.
how did my shape keys get stuck in the object level action dope sheet? (they supposed to be in the shape key dope sheet slot!). because of this, the 2.79 game engine wont see the animation! its so weird- i made animated SHAPE keys and can only get part of the animation to play as somehow the sequence got tangled up with another objects shape animation- how did i get another objects shape key sequence popping up in another objects shape key nla row? weird.
What is confusing is there is literally another tab called shape key editor. Do you think the animation nodes would make this interface obsolete? It's seems incredibly complex but it would put the rest of the animation interface to shame.
Shape keys are the Blender equivalent of what other apps call 'blend shapes' or 'morph targets'. They allow you to animate reconfigured geometry - like a face - so that you can key a smile, blinking, talking etc. UI-wise, the timeline is unlikely go any time soon. As for nodes, if you learned 3D using Maya you'll be used to keeping the Hypergraph open a lot of the time.
In this video i see we can freely move keyframe in timeline. But in my PC when i try to put a keyframe or drag the keyframe between 1 second gap it just skips to 2 second. Is there a setting that helps move keyframe smoothly. I'm on ver 2.9.
