Dope Sheet - Blender 2.80 Fundamentals

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 keyframe manipulation tool just like the graph editor and timeline which you can use to drag keyframes scale them retime them delete them etc 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 keyframe 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 keyframes in various ways these basic methods of keyframe manipulation all work in the dope sheet as well additional keyframe selection options also exist under the Select menu let's go ahead and make some keyframes 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 ctrl and pressing 2 on the number row then turn on AutoKey frame we'll set a keyframe for a high pose on the first frame and go to frame 10 and set a low pose where it's touching the grid we can then set a much lower high pose 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 keyframes here unlike the timeline our dope sheet provides a little bit more visual information about our keyframes for example each of these keyframes is a different shape based on the handle type by default in fact our keyframes 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 interpolation mode of your keyframes by pressing T or selecting one under the right-click context menu one would you want to do this well one of the most common interpolation modes besides the default bezier mode is the constant interpolation mode this is used most often for blocking and animation turning off interpolation so you can focus on your keyframes let's go ahead and select all of our keyframes by pressing a then press T to change our interpolation mode to constant as you can see our ball now snaps directly to each key frame without interpolating motion in between however you'll also notice that our keyframes have an added visual indicator of the keyframes interpolation mode being different specifically this green horizontal line between keyframes not only does this tell you that the interpolation mode has been edited but it also informs you where the interpolation mode is affecting the animation at a glance this can be very helpful when interpolation mode is only affecting certain keyframes and not others for example if we select our first frame and change that back to Bezier you'll notice that the constant interpolation mode doesn't begin until after the second keyframe but one thing you may have noticed is that we have far more keyframes here vertically than we did for the timeline this is because the dopesheet expands channel groups which shows us individual channels with keyframes 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 keyframes there is a parent keyframe that manipulates all keyframes below it to select all keyframes in a single column very quickly however you can simply hold alt and left click this is similar to how you can select edge loops in mesh edit mode speaking of groups you can actually create your own group of channels with its own parent key by selecting the channels on the left and going to the channel menu from there simply select group channels hotkey users can press ctrl-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 ungroup channels hotkey users can press ctrl alt 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 keyframe in our scene from every object to do that we can simply change the settings here which determines what keyframes to display by default this arrow cursor icon is enabled meaning that the dopesheet will only display keyframes of the objects you have selected however we can also toggle this off allowing the dopesheet to display all keyframes 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 and that are in collections that have been unchecked in case you ever get lost in the sea of keyframes or really need to zoom out quickly to see all of your keyframes 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 dopesheet 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 keyframe as a slider that you can adjust and anim very easily all in one place without this option you would need to go to wherever each channels 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 extremes 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 keyframe 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 that we're referring to are the interpolation 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 hotkey users can press a ctrl 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 interpolation mode to look and what curve extremes look like in some software the graph editor takes dominance as the keyframe manipulator even basic keyframe manipulation due to the absence of a powerful dope sheet however in blender with the dope sheet that it has much of the basic keyframe 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 blender

Channel: Blender

Views: 115,923

Keywords: blender, b3d, blender 3d, 2.8, 2.80, blender 2.8, blender foundation

Id: LHdh8p37yM8

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 30 2019