Introduction

The Dope Sheet.

Classical hand-drawn animators often made a chart, showing exactly when each drawing, sound and camera move would occur, and for how long. They nicknamed this the “dope sheet”. While CG foundations dramatically differ from classical hand-drawn animation, Blender’s Dope Sheet inherits a similar directive. It gives the animator a “birds-eye-view” of every thing occurring within a scene.

Dope Sheet Modes

Dope Sheet Modes.

There are four basic views for the Dope Sheet. These all view different contexts of animation:

Dope Sheet

The Dope Sheet Mode allow you to edit multiple actions at once.

Action Editor

Action Editor is where you can define and control actions.

Shape Key Editor

ShapeKey Editor is dedicated to the shape key data-blocks.

Grease Pencil

Grease Pencil Mode is dedicated to the grease pencil tool’s keyframes for each grease pencil layer, you have a strip along which you can grab its keys, and hence easily re-time your animated sketches.

Mask

Mask Mode is dedicated to the mask data-blocks.

Cache File

Todo.

Interface

The Dope Sheet Editor interface is somewhat similar to the Graph Editor one, it is divided in three regions:

The Action Editor with object channels.

Header

Here you find the menus, a first block of controls related to the editor “mode”, a second one concerning the action data-blocks, and a few other tools (like the copy/paste buttons, and snapping type).

Summary

ToDo.

View Menu

Sync Markers

Sync Markers with keyframe edits.

See Graph editor’s View Menu.

Marker Menu

See the Markers page.

Key Menu

Keyframe Type R

Sets the Keyframe Types of the selected keyframes.

See F-Curve.

Main Region

It contains the keyframes for all visible action channels. As with the other “time” editor, the X-axis represents time. The Y-axis has no mean in itself, unlike with the Graph Editor, it is a “stack” of action channels.

Each one being shown as an horizontal colored strip (of a darker shade “during” the animated/keyed period). On these channel strips lay the keyframes, visualized as light-gray (unselected) or yellow (selected) diamonds.

One of the key feature of this editor is that it allow you to visualize immediately which channel (i.e. F-Curve) is really affected. When the value of a given channel does not change at all between two neighboring keyframes (“long keyframes”), a gray (unselected) or yellow (selected) bar is drawn between them. Similar bars are drawn between keyframes tagged as moving hold.

Channels Region

The Action editor’s channels region.

See Channels.