Dope Sheet view area

User Guide > Animation > Animation > Animation Windows and Editors > Dope Sheet overview >

The view area of the Dope Sheet displays keys hierarchically along the vertical axis. It displays time along the horizontal axis as cells or blocks.

NoteThe time blocks represented in the view area of the Dope Sheet are integer value divisions of time; that is, the block at time 2 includes the range of animation information from 2 to 3, excluding information at time 3.

Animated attributes are bounded by solid lines to indicate their extents. The colors of the blocks define the placement of an attribute or group of attributes within the hierarchy of the Dope Sheet.

Editing ranges of time and keys with the Dope Sheet Manipulator

See Copy, cut, paste, scale, move, or mute a range of time and keys with the Dope Sheet Manipulator.

Key and Curve colors

Blue

All keys of all displayed objects (Summary object).

Dark green

All of the keyable attributes for the selected object in the Dope Sheet outliner (object groups).

Light green

All of the individual attributes of a particular type, such as translation, rotation, and so on (compound attributes).

Black

Keys for unselected individual attributes.

Yellow

Selected keys.

Gray

Keys with a value of 0.

The Dope Sheet pop-up menu bar

-clicking anywhere in the view area causes a pop-up menu containing the Dope Sheet menu bar items to appear.

Sound in the Dope Sheet

Sounds will appear in the Dope Sheet view area according to the settings in the Preferences window.

Select Tool, Move Tool, and Scale Tool

In addition to the Dope Sheet tools in the toolbar, the Select Tool, Move Tool, and Scale Tool also are used to manipulate keys in the view area of the Dope Sheet. Because of the hierarchical nature of the Dope Sheet outliner, you can edit groups of attributes by type. This lets you perform powerful timing editing on large numbers of objects at once. See Select Tool, Move Keys Tool, and Scale Keys Tool.

Navigating the view area

You can scroll the graph view of the Dope Sheet horizontally by holding down the (Linux and Windows) or (Mac OS X) key on the keyboard and -dragging.

To scale the graph view uniformly, hold down the or key and drag or -drag the cursor.

To scale the graph view along either the horizontal or vertical axis, hold down the or and key, and -drag the cursor horizontally or vertically.