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.

The Dope Sheet.

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.

Dope Sheet modes.

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.

The Dope Sheet Editor with object channels.

Keyframes can take on various colors and shapes:

Gray	Unselected
Yellow	Selected
Other colors	Custom keyframe tag set by the user (Key ‣ Keyframe Type)
Diamond	Free Keyframe Handle (Key ‣ Handle Type)
Round	Auto-Clamped Keyframe Handle
Circle	Automatic Keyframe Handle
Square	Vector Keyframe Handle
Rhombus	Aligned Keyframe Handle
Gray bar between keys	Held key (the two keyframes are identical)
Green line between keys	The curve segment uses custom interpolation (Key ‣ Interpolation Mode)
Upwards arrow	Local maximum in curve (visible if View ‣ Show Curve Extremes is enabled)
Downwards arrow	Local minimum in curve

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