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The Dope Sheet is one of the most powerful animation tools in Blender.

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But what is the Dope Sheet?

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Well, the Dope Sheet is a keyframe manipulation tool,

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just like the Graph Editor and Timeline, which you can use to drag keyframes, scale them,

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retime them, delete them, etc. So let's see how to use the Dope Sheet.

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To access the Dope Sheet, you can create a new panel in your current workspace by right-clicking,

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selecting Split Area, and left-clicking to confirm. You can then select the Dope Sheet Editor from the Editor drop-down menu.

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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.

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Now, if you haven't seen the Timeline video,

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I highly recommend going to watch that for a basic understanding of how animation and keyframe manipulation works.

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Both the Timeline and the Dope Sheet can do basic keyframe manipulation,

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but the Dope Sheet has a few extra features. If you've seen the Timeline video,

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you'll know that you can select and transform keyframes in various ways.

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These basic methods of keyframe manipulation all work in the Dope Sheet as well.

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Additional keyframe selection options also exist under the Select menu.

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Let's go ahead and make some keyframes for our object so we can see what this looks like.

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Just like our Timeline video, let's once again animate a simple bouncing ball.

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To do this, simply subdivide your default cube by holding Ctrl and pressing 2 on the number row.

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Then turn on Auto Keyframe.

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We'll set a keyframe for a high pose on the first frame. Go to frame 10 and set a low pose where it's touching the grid.

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We can then set a much lower high pose on frame 15 and

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duplicate frame 10 to frame 20 for our final low pose.

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Excellent! Now we can go ahead and change our handle type for our extreme low poses on frame 10 and 20.

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This will once again give us that bouncing ball look.

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We can also bring our end frame back to 40 for a shorter playback loop time.

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However, let's pay attention to our keyframes here.

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Unlike the Timeline, our Dope Sheet provides a little bit more visual information about our keyframes.

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For example, each of these keyframes is a different shape based on the handle type.

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By default, in fact, our keyframes are no longer diamond, but rather round circles.

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Circle shows that the handle type is auto clamped, while square means vector.

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Feel free to test what shapes the other handles are.

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Additionally, you can also change the interpolation mode of your keyframes by pressing T or selecting one under the right-click context menu.

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When would you want to do this?

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Well, one of the most common interpolation modes, besides the default Bezier mode, is the Constant Interpolation mode.

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This is used most often for blocking an animation, turning off interpolation so you can focus on your keyframes.

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Let's go ahead and select all of our keyframes by pressing A, then press T to change our interpolation mode to Constant.

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As you can see, our ball now snaps directly to each keyframe without interpolating motion in between.

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However, you'll also notice that our keyframes have an added visual indicator of the keyframes interpolation mode being different,

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specifically this green horizontal line between keyframes.

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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.

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This can be very helpful when interpolation mode is only affecting certain keyframes and not others.

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For example, if we select our first frame and change that back to Bezier,

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you'll notice that the Constant Interpolation mode doesn't begin until after the second keyframe.

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But one thing you may have noticed is that we have far more keyframes here vertically than we did for the timeline.

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This is because the DOPESheet expands channel groups, which shows us individual channels with keyframes that belong to each one.

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This gives us access to individual channels such as X-Location or Z-Rotation.

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Keep in mind that above every column of keyframes, there is a parent keyframe that manipulates all keyframes below it.

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To select all keyframes in a single column very quickly, however, you can simply hold Alt and left-click.

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This is similar to how you can select edge loops in Mesh Edit mode.

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Speaking of groups, you can actually create your own group of channels with its own parent keyframe

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by selecting the channels on the left and going to the channel menu. From there, simply select Group Channels.

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Hotkey users can press Ctrl G.

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This will create a new group that you can expand or collapse with whatever channels you like, assuming they belong to the same object.

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To remove a channel from an existing group, simply select it and go to the same channels menu and select Ungroup Channels.

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Hotkey users can press Ctrl Alt G.

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For additional channel specific settings, feel free to experiment with the other functions in the channel menu.

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Now the channels we see here are determined by what object we have selected.

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But what if we wanted to see every keyframe in our scene from every object?

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To do that, we can simply change the settings here, which determines what keyframes to display.

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By default, this arrow cursor icon is enabled, meaning that the dope sheet will only display keyframes of the objects you have selected.

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However, we can also toggle this off, allowing the dope sheet to display all keyframes of all currently visible objects.

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To also include hidden objects,

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simply toggle on the middle button with the dotted line cube icon.

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This will include any objects that are not visible.

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However, it does not include objects that are in collections that have been unchecked.

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In case you ever get lost in the sea of keyframes or really need to zoom out quickly to see all of your keyframes,

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simply hover over the dope sheet and press Home. You can also go to View, View All.

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Now let's talk about a few more advanced dope sheet features that will be able to help us in our animation workflow.

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For starters, the View menu will give us several different functions and tools already.

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Over here we have our preview range tools. Remember the stopwatch icon on the timeline?

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This is for setting that same preview range that the stopwatch icon toggles on and off.

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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.

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The Show Sliders option displays the values of each keyframe as a slider that you can adjust and animate very easily all in one place.

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Without this option, you would need to go to wherever each channel's value is displayed separately on the UI to change its value directly.

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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.

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The Show Curve Extremes option allows you to see the peaks and troughs of your object's motion for that particular channel.

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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.

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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,

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which lines up with what our object is doing.

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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?

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That's a great question. The curves we're referring to are the interpolation curves that can be seen and edited directly in the Graph Editor.

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You can actually very easily enter the Graph Editor from the Dope Sheet by going to View, Toggle Graph Editor.

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Hotkey users can press Ctrl-Tab while hovering over the Dope Sheet to toggle between the Graph Editor and the Dope Sheet.

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In the Graph Editor, you'll be able to see the curves clearly, showing exactly how the interpolation modes look and what curve extremes look like.

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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.

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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.

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But the Graph Editor can still be very helpful for advanced tweaking and visualization.

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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.