Blender offers several different kinds of editing windows specifically to do with animation.
Timeline
You have previously come across the Timeline
This window also lets you define markers which you can name to identify important points in the animation, for informational purposes. Also, using the “Bind Camera to Marker” function, you can dynamically switch the active camera at marked points in the animation, to cut between different viewpoints.
Graph Editor
You previously saw how to define keyframes for animating a property, such as an object position or material setting. But what if you get a keyframe definition slightly wrong? Perhaps the timing is slightly off, or the movement is not quite right. You could delete the keyframe and try again. But, in many cases, it would be easier if you could get into the actual definition of the keyframe and tweak it around a bit, move its time position, adjust the animated property values, that kind of thing.
This is the purpose of the Graph Editor
Dope Sheet
The Dope Sheet
Actually, this window can show any of five different editor submodes: Dope Sheet, Action Editor, Shape Key Editor, Grease Pencil or Mask. The Action Editor is useful in conjunction with the NLA Editor (below).
- See also: Dopesheet on the Blender Wiki.
NLA Editor
The NLA (“Non-Linear Animation”) Editor
To edit the contents of an action in the Graph Editor, you select the action and TAB into “tweak mode” (analogous to Edit mode in the 3D view). TAB again takes you out of Tweak mode.
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Actions do not appear in the Timeline or Dope Sheet. This means that, once you start to use actions, you no longer get a correct overview of your animation in these two windows. The Timeline is still useful for its transport controls, but otherwise you should stick to the NLA Editor for your overview. |
However, the Action Editor submode of the Dope Sheet now becomes useful, for creating new actions. These start out initially empty of any keyframes or FCurves, but you can add these in Tweak mode.
- See Also: NLA Editor on the Blender Wiki.
To Summarize...
The above description may seem rather confusing in places. Basically, there are two ways to organize your animation:
- Linear, as a single sequence of FCurves and keyframes
- Non-linear, as a sequence of actions, each consisting of a sequence of FCurves and keyframes. The nonlinear data can be further divided into multiple overlapping tracks, which combine together at any moment in time to produce the complete animation.
Objects that can have animation data attached to them can have both kinds, linear and nonlinear. You can even attach both kinds at once, though then the linear animation data takes precedence. It is easy to change your mind and switch back and forth; typically, the development of a simple animation might start out linear, then change to nonlinear as it gets more complicated.