Animation with the Dope Sheet

Editing Animation with the Dope Sheet

Note that much of the functionality and behavior of the Dope Sheet is similar to the Graph Editor, and this chapter will focus on the unique elements of the Dope Sheet, referring you to Chapter 4 Using the Graph Editor on where appropriate.

Use the Dope Sheet primarily for the manipulating of key times, represented as colored rectangles in the view area.

The blocks represent integer time units along the horizontal axis, and the vertical axis represents the items currently loaded into the Outliner. The Dope Sheet consists of four components:

• the Outliner
• the menu bar
• the toolbar
• the view area

The Dope Sheet is available as a panel in a modeling view or as an independent window.

To place the Dope Sheet in a modeling view, select the modeling view in which you want the Dope Sheet to appear, and then select Panels > Panel > Dope Sheet.

To open the Dope Sheet as an independent window, select Window > Animation Editors > Dope Sheet.

Using the Dope Sheet menu bar

The Edit, View, Tangents, and Options menus operate in the same way as they do in the Graph Editor. These functions are discussed in Chapter 4 Using the Graph Editor on .

Using the Dope Sheet toolbar

The Move Nearest Picked Key Tool and Insert Key Tool items are discussed on .

Using Add Keys

The Add Keys Tool places a new key at the time and for the attribute where you click the middle mouse button. It functions as the Add Keys tool in the Graph Editor with an important exception. Because the Dope Sheet view area does not display values, using the Add Key tool in this window results in keys being placed with their value set to the current value of the attribute.

Using the Dope Sheet Outliner

The Outliner hierarchically represents the attributes of selected objects.

See the discussion of the properties of the Outliner window in Using Maya: Basics.

The Dope Sheet Outliner differs from the Graph Editor Outliner. The Dope Sheet Outliner organizes attributes in groups according to type and object. This lets you manipulate entire collections of attributes at once. For example, all of the rotation attributes of objects listed in the outliner are summarized and available for manipulation in the Summary group Rotate.

The organization of this grouping descends as follows:

• Summary-all keys all selected objects by attribute type;
• objects-all the keyed attributes for the selected objects in the Outliner;
• compound attributes-all the individual attributes of a particular type, such as translation, rotation, and so on;
• attributes-individual attributes are the lowest level of the Dope Sheet Outliner hierarchy.

Note When Summary, object, and compound attribute groups are collapsed in the Outliner, attributes within a collapsed hierarchy are not selected and therefore not edited when you perform actions in the view area.

Working in the Dope Sheet view area

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

Note The 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.

• red-all keys of all displayed objects (Summary object)
• blue-all of the keyed attributes for the selected object in the Outliner (object groups)
• green-all of the individual attributes of a particular type, such as translation, rotation, and so on (compound attributes)
• dark green-keys for unselected individual attributes
• yellow-selected keys
• brown-keys for unselected attributes whose values are zero (particularly useful for working with the Blend Shapes Editor where zero-value attributes are frequently important)

The pop-up Dope Sheet menu bar

Clicking with the right mouse button anywhere in the view area causes a pop-up menu containing the Dope Sheet menu bar items to appear.

See .

Sound in the Dope Sheet

Loaded sound files will appear in the Dope Sheet view area as waveforms, letting you synchronize events with sound.

For a discussion of importing and using sound in Maya, please see page .

Select Tool, Move Tool & 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.

A simple example of using grouped attributes to edit timing is an animation in which you want two objects to achieve identical translation values at the same time, but their times are not yet synchronized.

In the following animation, both objects must arrive at the origin (translation values 0 0 0) at time 24, but the sphere is arriving at time 12.

To use the Dope Sheet to adjust event timing:

1

With the objects selected and the Dope Sheet window open, the objects and the Summary group are visible. The Summary group possesses translation and scale groups (as these are the only attributes involved in this animation). 

2

Expand the Translate Summary group by clicking on the small circled plus (+) sign. This makes available all of the translation attributes for editing. C (Clicking on Translate, the Move Tool, and dragging with the middle mouse button would cause all keyable attributes would be highlighted yellow, and all translate attributes would be moved in time.) 

3

To edit only the translation timing for the single fighter, expand the spitfireHandle object group, and select the Translate compound attribute group. 

4

Click on the Move Tool. With the middle mouse button, drag the selected keys until the end key of the selected keys lines up with the end keys of the other object's animation. 

Note that when acting on selected keys, the blocks above the attribute or attribute group hierarchically in the Outliner also are highlighted. 

Moving Around the View Area

You can scroll the graph view of the Dope Sheet vertically and horizontally by holding down the Alt key on the keyboard and dragging with the middle mouse button.

To scale the graph view uniformly, hold down the Alt key and drag the cursor with the middle and left mouse buttons.

To scale the graph view along either the horizontal or vertical axis, hold down the Alt and Shift keys, and drag the cursor horizontally or vertically with the middle and left mouse buttons.