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of structure (the armature) that is composed of a number of smaller pieces, the bones. Each bone receives
its own full set of keys and F-curves, for translation, rotation, and scale. The fairly simple character rig
that we've created has almost a hundred bones. If you were to keyframe each of these and try to determine
what was going on in the F-curve editor, it would look like a bowl of spaghetti. There would be so much
information that the visualization of it would be next to useless.
So, when working with character animation and dealing with keyframes from dozens of bones at once,
we use the Dope Sheet, shown in Figure 11.1 . The Dope Sheet shows all of the keyframes for every
object and property in your scene, accumulated on a single screen. The white diamonds in the figure each
represent a keyframe for their particular channel.
If you look at the expanded section of the editor shown in Figure 11.2 , you'll see that each white key
diamond actually stands in for any number of actual keys that are contained by its component parts. In
Figure 11.2 , the channel for the Body Control bone has been expanded to show all of its individual
animation channels: X, Y, and Z Location; W, X, Y, and Z Rotation; and X, Y, and Z Scale. The main
Body Control channel, which is all that usually shows, displays a keyframe dot anywhere that a key appears
in any of its components. You can see this with the yellow keys, as the first stack of four represents
a rotation key, with the ones four frames later representing both location and scale keys. The Body
Control channel itself has yellow keys on both frames. Note also that the overall armature channel shows
the same style of key accu-
mulation for all of the bones
in the armature.
So, each channel in the
Dope Sheet is really showing
a summary of the keys of all
of its component parts down
to the F-curve level. And
even those, say, Body Con-
trol's X Location channel,
are a summary of the F-curve
itself, showing only the loca-
tions of the keyframes in
time and not the interpola-
tion curve between them.
Those yellow keyframes are
selected . Like all selected
objects in Blender, they are
eligible for transformation,
duplication, and deletion.
This is how the Dope Sheet
editor helps you as you work Figure 11.1   The Dope  Sheet.
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