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490 Chapter 12: Animation
Classical animation technique included the use of
an exposure sheet, called an “X” sheet or a Dope
Sheet. The Dope Sheet was a vertical char t that
served as instruc tions to t he camera operator.
Dialogue and camera ac tions were indicated
over a numbered list that represented each shot,
which became a single photographed frame of
the animate d movie. The classical exposure
sheet also included instruct ions for compositing
the cel drawings of animated characters over
backgrounds. This dev ice ser ves as inspiration for
the Dope Sheet tool in 3ds Max.
The 3ds Max Dope Sheet editor is similar to
the classic X sheet. It displays key frames over
time, only using a horizontal graph (rather than
vertical). This provides tools for adjusting the
timing of your animation. Here, you can see all
the keys in a spreadsheet-ty p e interface. You can
select any or all of the keys in a scene, scale them,
move them, copy and paste them, or otherwise
work directly here, rather than in the viewport.
You can choose to select the keys for children, or
subtree, or both, so you can make simple changes
that affect many objects and their keys at once.
A common use of Dope Sheet is to stagger the
movement of a character’s limbs so they don’t
all move simultaneously. If you have a crowd of
characters, you could use Dope Sheet to shift
movements so they don’t all move in unison.
Dop e Shee t M enus a nd Tool s
IntheDopeSheet,youcanselectanyorallofthe
keysinascene,scalethem,movethem,copyand
paste them, or otherwise work directly, rather than
working w ith objects in viewpor ts. You can choose
to select the keys for children, or subtree or both,
so you can make simple changes that affect many
objects and their keys at once.
Dope Sheet allows for soft-selection of keys which
is very useful when working with motion capture
datathathaskeysoneveryframe.
Dope Sheet provides tools for working directly
w ith time. You can select, cut, copy, paste, and
insert and reverse t ime using the tools on the Time
menu.
Like the
Curve Editor (page 2–489) ,DopeSheet
has both a menu bar and toolbars to provide you
quick access to tools.
Dope Sheet menu bar
Unlike Curve E ditor, Dope Sheet has two modes:
Edit Keys and E dit Ranges. These modes change
the display in the Key window.
Edit K eys Mode
When Edit Keys is turned on, the keyframes are
displayed as boxes within rectangles on a grid.
The keys are color-coded to show what has been
keyfr amed (position is red, scale is yellow, rotation
is green, and so on.)
Colored keys
Dope Sheet keys are now displayed as rectangles
within boxes so you can easily spot
sub-frame
keys
, keys that fall in-between frames. Keys that
fill the boxes are on the frame, keys that are small
rectangles are sub-frame.