Original subtitles

- [Instructor] Before we go further

and talk about the dope sheet,

we need to talk a bit about Blender's data.

If you're beginning with Blender,

the most common data you are manipulating

is the material of an object.

You may have watched tutorial

where you create a material

and then you share it on multiple object.

For example, we can see this blue material applied

to the Suzanne head.

If I select the cube,

I can go into the library

and apply to it the blue material too.

Both object are now sharing the same material

or sharing the same material data.

With my cube selected,

if I apply again the blue material,

I will see the number two appearing next

to the material name.

This number indicate how many object

or users are currently using this blue material

and it's current two, the monkey head

and the cube.

It means that if I change the color of this material,

it will be changing on both object

because it's the same data that they are sharing.

So as explained in the very first video of this chapter,

objects are just containers

and if I go to the mesh data,

I will also find a data library

that will allow me to source any other mesh data

from any other object.

With the cube selected,

if I select the sphere mesh data,

my cube will be transformed into a sphere

and Blender indicates us

that there are two objects using those mesh data.

We have also seen that the object

has changed color because the material

is bound to the vertices.

By loading new mesh data,

we have also sourced the material data linked to it.

If we now go back to our bouncing ball animation,

with the graph editor open,

I can see that I'm working on the ball

but just under, we have the SphereAction.002

that we haven't talked about.

And when we look at at our graph editor hierarchy,

we can see our mesh object, the ball.

The SphereAction.002 is bound to the ball

and all the transformed channel keyframes

are bound to this SphereAction.

Instead of the graph editor,

let's open the dope sheet.

Let's consider the dope sheet as being like the timeline.

All the shortcuts and features we have seen

with the timeline works within the dope sheet.

We can see our mesh object

and the action in the hierarchy.

If I now enable the collection cone,

and I start animating the location

of the cone by inserting a couple of keyframe,

a new hierarchy appear in the dope sheet.

We can find our cone object

with a new action called coneAction.

As soon as you insert a keyframe on an object

that hasn't been animated yet,

it will automatically create a new action.

This action are the name of the container

that contain animation data

and the dope sheet is an overview

of all the animation data

that are being used in our scene.

Here we can see which container

is using the animation data

and what action is being used

but now what if I want to edit those animation data?

We can access them through the action editor.

With the action editor,

we will be able to work on a specific action at a time.

With the cone selected, I can see

that I'm working on the cone action

and as for any other kind of data,

if I click the action icon,

I will access our action library.

So it means that as for material

or any kind of data,

I can share this animation to any other object.

So I will select my SphereAction.002,

rename it bouncing ball

and when I play the animation,

I can see that now my cone is moving

as our bouncing ball.

And near the action name,

I can see that I have two users

of the bouncing ball animation.

So I can share this animation on as many object as I want.

I can give it to Suzanne here

and now we can see that we have three users

and when I play the animation,

our Suzanne monkey head will move

as the bouncing ball too.

Since I've given the bouncing ball animation

to all my object,

the point action, for example,

has no more users.

And if I brought my action library,

I will see this little zero in front of the coneAction

and you have to be very careful with that

because whenever you have any kind of data

that has a zero in front of its name,

then they will get rid of this data

as soon as you close the software.

So if I revert my scene, now reopen it if you will,

the coneAction marked with a zero has disappeared

and I've lost this animation.

To avoid losing an animation,

you can click the little shield icon

that will create a new fake user.

Whether the data is used or not,

then I won't flush it on restart.

As we have seen before with the materials,

as soon as a data or an action is shared,

editing it on one of the object

will affect any other container

that is using the same action.

If you want to duplicate the current action,

you can click the number next to it's name.

This become a new action

or a new data that you can edit freely

and you can see that there is not more multiple users

on this one.

And this new duplicated action

has been added to the action library.

To definitely get rid of an action,

Shift + click the cross icon.

When reverting the file or reloading Blender,

the animation data or the action will be removed.

If you're starting fresh

and your object is not animating,

you can press the New button to create a new action.

I will insert a couple of keyframe

to illustrate one thing.

When you get this orange continuous line

between two frames,

it means that the value is not changing.

As soon as I enter a value on one of the transform channel,

we can see that now there is no more this orange line

on the z location channel.

Switching to constant or linear interpolation

will create a green line between the different keyframes.

So it basically tells you

that you are not choosing Bezier interpolation.

Changing the handle type of your keyframe

will be also displayed in the action editor.

You will see the shape of the key currently changing.

The action editor will become our main editor

when it comes to animation

before we jump into the graph editor.

To summarize, we have see that the dope sheet shows us

all the current actions that are being used

in our Blender scene,

while the action editor allow us

to edit one action at a time.

Action is the name of the container

for our motion or animation data and as any other data,

an action can be shared by different object.