This topic explains options found in the Dope Sheet Channels menu. For information on using the Dope Sheet Editor, see Edit Keys using the Dope Sheet.
The Channels menu items are functions for processing animation channels.
- Mute Channel/Unmute Channel
-
- Mute a channel to isolate and focus on a specific part of an animation. For example, working with a model whose arms and legs are animated, you can use mute to turn off animation of either the arms or legs.
Note: Muted channels appear brown in the Channel box.
- You can view, manipulate, and add keys to a muted channel in the Dope Sheet, which is useful when you want to isolate and review specific parts of your animation. When you edit a muted channel, the corresponding animation channel updates in the Dope Sheet View area.
- You can also use the
Mute Channel
button in the
Dope Sheet Editor outliner to toggle the muting of channels.
- Lock Channel / Unlock Channel
-
- Hotkey: H/J
- Use Lock Channel to freeze attributes on the channel so that they can't be changed. Unlike Mute Channel, you can still view the locked channel animation, but you can't edit it.
- You can also use the Lock
button in the
Dope Sheet Editor outliner to toggle the locking of channels.
- Bake Channel
-
This operation calculates a new animation channel for an attribute using the input nodes that contribute to its properties. Click Channels > Bake Channel >
to open the
Bake Channel options which let you specify a range of animation to bake.
Bake Channel is useful when you want to:
- Edit a single animation channel instead of all contributing attributes that affect the behavior of a single attribute, for example, an object affected by a driven key or an Expression.
- Add keys to an existing channel
- See Bake Animation in the Dope Sheet in the Bake keys topic for steps on how to bake Dope Sheet Channels.
- Offset keys
- Pushes selected keys by a specific amount in the
Dope Sheet Editor. The default is 1 frame. Click
Channels >
Offset keys >
to open the
Offset Curves Options which let you move keys by a specified amount.
- Spreadsheet
-
The Spreadsheet in the Attribute Editor
This menu selection lets you edit the attributes of the selected animation channels in the Attribute Editor Attribute Spreadsheet so you can view and edit multiple attribute values simultaneously in a table format.