The dope sheet is one of the most powerful animation tools in blender.
But what is the dope sheet?
Well,
the dope sheet is a key frame manipulation
tool just like the graph editor and timeline.
Which you can use to drag key frames, scale them re time them. Delete them, et cetera.
So let's see how to use the dope sheet
to access the dope sheet.
You can create a new panel in your current workspace by right clicking,
selecting split area and left clicking to confirm.
You can then select the dope sheet editor from the editor. Drop down menu.
Alternatively, however,
you can simply go to the animation workspace and the dope sheet
will be provided for you at the bottom instead of the timeline.
Now, if you haven't seen the timeline video,
I highly recommend going to watch that for a basic
understanding of how animation and key frame manipulation works.
Both the timeline and the dope sheet can do basic key frame manipulation,
but the dope sheet has a few extra features.
If you've seen the timeline video,
you'll know that you can select and transform key frames in various ways.
These basic methods of key frame manipulation all work in the dope sheet as well.
Additional key frame selection options also exist under the select menu.
Let's go ahead and make some key frames for our
object so we can see what this looks like.
Just like our timeline video. Let's once again animate a simple bouncing ball
to do this.
Simply subdivide your default cube by holding control
and pressing to on the number row,
then turn on auto key frame.
We'll set a key frame for a hypos on the first frame.
Go to frame 10 and set a low pose where it's touching the grid.
We can then set a much lower hypos on frame 15
And duplicate frame 10 to frame 20
for our final low pose.
Excellent.
Now we can go ahead and change our handle type
for our extreme low poses on frame 10 and 20.
This will once again give us that bouncing ball look.
We can also bring our end frame back to 40 for a shorter playback loop time.
However, let's pay attention to our key frames here.
Unlike the timeline,
our dope sheet provides a little bit more visual information about our key frames.
For example,
each of these key frames is a different shape based on the handle type
by default. In fact are key frames are no longer diamond but rather round circles,
circle shows that the handle type is auto clamped while square means vector.
Feel free to test what shapes the other handles are.
Additionally,
you can also change the interpretation mode of your key frames by
pressing T or selecting one under the right click context menu.
When would you want to do this?
Well,
one of the most common interpretation modes besides the
default busier mode is the constant interpretation mode.
This is used most often for blocking and animation.
Turning off interpretation so you can focus on your key frames.
Let's go ahead and select all of our key frames by pressing a
then press T to change our interpretation mode to constant
as you can see our ball now snaps directly
to each key frame without interpreting motion in between.
However you'll also notice that are key frames have
an added visual indicator of the key frames.
Interpolation mode being different.
Specifically this green horizontal line between key frames.
Not only does this tell you that the interpretation mode has been edited but it
also informs you where the interpretation mode
is affecting the animation at a glance.
This can be very helpful when interpretation mode is
only affecting certain key frames and not others.
For example if we select our first frame and change that back to be easier.
You'll notice that the constant interpretation mode doesn't
begin until after the second key frame.
But one thing you may have noticed is that we have far
more key frames here vertically than we did for the timeline.
This is because the dope sheet expands channel groups which shows
us individual channels with key frames that belong to each one.
This gives us access to individual channels such as X location or Z rotation.
Keep in mind that above every column of key frames there is a parent key frame
that manipulates all key frames below it
to select all key frames in a single column very quickly.
However, you can simply hold salt and left click.
This is similar to how you can select edge loops and mesh edit mode.
Speaking of groups,
you can actually create your own group of channels with its own parent key
frame by selecting the channels on the left and going to the channel menu
from there, simply select group channels.
Hockey users can press Control G.
This will create a new group that you can expand or collapse
with whatever channels you like assuming they belong to the same object.
To remove a channel from an existing group,
simply select it and go to the same channels menu and select ungroomed channels.
Hockey users can press Control
G.
For additional channel specific settings.
Feel free to experiment with the other functions in the channel menu.
Now the channels we see here are determined by what object we have selected,
but what if we wanted to see every key frame in our scene from every object
to do that.
We can simply change the settings here, which determines what key frames to display
by default.
This arrow cursor icon is enabled,
meaning that the dope sheet will only display
key frames of the objects you have selected.
However,
we can also toggle this off allowing the dope sheet
to display all key frames of all currently visible objects
to also include hidden objects.
Simply toggle on the middle button with the dotted line cube icon.
This will include any objects that are not visible.
However,
it does not include objects that are in collections that have been unchecked
in case you ever get lost in the sea of key frames or
really need to zoom out quickly to see all of your key frames
simply hover over the dope sheet and press home.
You can also go to view view all.
Now let's talk about a few more advanced dope sheet features
that will be able to help us in our animation workflow.
For starters the view menu will give
us several different functions and tools already
over here we have our preview range tools
remember the stopwatch icon on the timeline?
This is for setting that same preview range
that the stopwatch icon toggles on and off.
Simply select set preview range and you'll be able to click and drag
an area to set the beginning and end frames of the preview range.
The show sliders option
displays the values of each key frame as a slider that
you can adjust and animate very easily all in one place.
Without this option you would need to go to
wherever each channel's value is displayed separately on the Ui
to change its value directly.
Also this removes the need to go into the graph editor for very
small adjustments but we'll talk about the graph editor in another video.
The show curve.
Extreme option allows you to see the peaks and
troughs of your objects motion for that particular channel.
This will make more sense if you see it in the graph editor.
But for now let's take a look at our Z location channel.
As you can see based on these new key frame shapes.
You can see that our curve is bending downwards for
these frames and bending back upwards for these frames,
which lines up with what our object is doing.
But you might be wondering what is a curve.
And why do we keep talking about it when
we're only looking at dots and straight lines here.
That's a great question.
The curves were referring to are the interpretation curves that
can be seen and edited directly in the graph editor.
You can actually very easily enter the graph
editor from the dope sheet by going to view
toggle graph editor.
Hockey users can press control tab while hovering over the dope
sheet to toggle between the graph editor and the dope sheet.
In the graph editor, you'll be able to see the curves clearly,
showing exactly how the interpretation modes look
and what curve extremes look like.
In some software, the graph editor takes dominance as the key frame manipulator.
Even basic key frame manipulation
due to the absence of a powerful dope sheet.
However,
in blunder with the dope sheet that it has much of the basic
key frame manipulation can be done very
easily without sifting through complex curves.
But the graph editor can still be
very helpful for advanced tweaking and visualization.
We'll talk more about the graph editor in the next video.
I hope this video has shown you how powerful
the dope sheet is for animation in blunder.