Introduction

The Dope Sheet offers a bird’s-eye view of the keyframes inside the scene. It’s inspired by classical hand-drawn animation, where animators make use of a chart showing exactly when each drawing, sound, and camera move will occur, and for how long.

Dope Sheet Modes

The editor has several different modes that can be selected from a dropdown in the header. The default Dope Sheet mode gives an overview of most types of animatable data. For others, such as masks, you need to switch to a more specific mode.

The modes are as follows:

• Dope Sheet

• Action Editor

• Shape Key Editor

• Grease Pencil

• Mask

• Cache File: originally meant to show the baked animation data in Alembic files, but never implemented.

Main Region

The Dope Sheet Editor shows a stack of channels (animatable properties), and for each channel, a series of keyframes laid out along the time axis.

Keyframes can take on various colors and shapes:

Keyframes can be selected by clicking and moved by dragging. See the Select and Key menus for more options.