Timeline buttons in the dope sheet pane
Why everytime Im animating,I need to have both my timeline panel open and my dope sheet (cause the buttos that are on the timeline panel are not on the dope sheet as well),I think at least add the Auto keying option please 🥺
9 Comments
I agree, but I think we also need to have a switch to the animation panels to switch between them to solve what others here already mentioned. I'll explain;
I now use an addon to have the play controls on each of the animation panels (timeline, graph editor, action editor at least) just like you want.
I only want to have one animation panel open at a time tho and therefor I use the Switch addon to use dope sheet, graph, action editor and timeline all in the same panel. Now I switch instantly from one to the other animation panel without the need to have multiple animation panels open and don't have to use that inconvenient dropdown to switch a panel, but just a single click on a button with an icon.
This way you always only see one play controls bar at a time. Namely only in the type of animation editor you're in.
I'm pretty sure most if not all animators only need one of these editors at a time, but would like to easily and instantly switch between them to go back and forth or switch when going to another animation phase (stepped timing/blocking, linear, curves etc.) This way you always have the playhead controls visible and never more than one animation panel open. I consider that an ideal animation workflow. And therefor it would definitely make sense to me to have this natively in Blender instead of needing these two addons.
Can you offer the name/source of that addon? I found "switch" than you mentioned above, and am interested in the other as well - thanks :)
I had to look it up because it's not a single feature addon; It's the Frame Ranger addon doing this. Which is a great addon for several other animation related things too. Have fun with it!
I don't get what is the use of the timeline. I only use it for the menus it has that don't appear in the dope sheet.
It's frankly bizarre that all of the animation panels don't have playback controls.
You would then just waste a lot of space on each animation editor to display one identical thing many times.
Many other softwares don't have the playback controls in any of their animation editors to begin with, it's an independent part of the GUI.
What? I completely disagree with this. The playback controls are in the middle of the menu bar of the timeline panel.
The Dopesheet and Graph Editor have that same menu bar, with just a wide blank space of nothing there. The controls could be right there, and would waste literally no space at all, and not make the menu bar take any more real estate.
Plus, this assumes I'm using multiple editors all the time - which honestly, I am currently - because only one of them has playback controls . I'd shift-F12 between them and only have to use one editor window if I could...
True, but they also have a static control bar that isn't locked to a particular editor. This allows the user to switch between dope & curve without loosing the ability to hit the controller buttons.
I'm not sure what you disagree with here. Playback controls don't need to be duplicated in every editor that uses time. Even if you might not use multiple anim editors at once if you could. Much like we don't need a specific editor open to chose the current scene or viewlayer.
Having a dedicated UI element for it would make more sense than the current situation of having editors carrying unrelated things and forcing users to open unnecessary editors "just" for that.
I quoted what I disagreed with...?
Let's make an analogy: How great would it be, if you had to go to the Shader editor every time you wanted to change your 3D view from wireframe to shaded?
That's a lot like having to change from the dopesheet to a different editor just to access the playback controls.