The Dope Sheet

Our three poses look fine, but the animation is nothing to write home about just yet. Rain doesn’t “hold” her poses and it looks unnatural. At this stage, we can start adjusting our keyframes, duplicating them so as to determine how long each pose should be held before it transitions to the next one.

Let’s bring up the whole thing in the Graph Editor:

Figure 7.13: Graph Editor

This looks fine. Just kidding! Can you imagine? Character animation, along with other complex kinds of animation, yields too many F-curves for us to practically visualize in the graph editor all at once. Technically speaking, we could use it, but let’s not.

For broad control over animations with a lot of animation channels, we have the Dope Sheet instead. Named after the spreadsheets used by traditional animators to plan the timing of their shots, a Dope Sheet can track the position (in time) of any/all keyframes in our animation...