# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Animation Editors

|nextText=Introducing the Graph Editor
|previous=The Ways of the Animator
|previousText=The Ways of the Animator
}}
```
Blender offers several different kinds of editing windows specifically
to do with animation.

## Timeline

You have previously come across the Timeline
![](Blender270TimelineIcon.png "Blender270TimelineIcon.png") view as the
simplest way to see the keyframes in an animation. This window also
includes transport controls that you can use to start and stop the
animation, jump to a particular frame with
, and scrub by dragging across a time
range with .

This window also lets you define *markers* which you can name to
identify important points in the animation, for informational purposes.
Also, using the "Bind Camera to Marker" function, you can dynamically
switch the active camera at marked points in the animation, to cut
between different viewpoints.

## Graph Editor

You previously saw how to define keyframes for animating a property,
such as an object position or material setting. But what if you get a
keyframe definition slightly wrong? Perhaps the timing is slightly off,
or the movement is not quite right. You could delete the keyframe and
try again. But, in many cases, it would be easier if you could get into
the actual definition of the keyframe and tweak it around a bit, move
its time position, adjust the animated property values, that kind of
thing.

This is the purpose of the Graph Editor
![](Blender270GraphEditorIcon.png "Blender270GraphEditorIcon.png"). It
gives you the most detailed, low-level view possible of your animation,
by drawing an *FCurve* for each animated property of the selected
object, representing how the property value varies over time. Each curve
has control points located at each of its keyframes, and you can move
these points around---horizontally to change the timing, or vertically
to change the keyframe value---as well as add and remove points.

## Dope Sheet

The Dope Sheet
![](Blender270DopeSheetIcon.png "Blender270DopeSheetIcon.png") gives a
high-level view of your animation, similar to the Timeline, but slightly
more detailed. Here you see the separate keyframes for each animated
object, and you can do some limited editing, like moving the keyframes
around, and duplicating and deleting keyframes, but you can't seem to
add entirely new ones.

Actually, this window can show any of five different editor submodes:
Dope Sheet, Action Editor, Shape Key Editor, Grease Pencil or Mask. The
Action Editor is useful in conjunction with the NLA Editor (below).

-   **See also:**
    Dopesheet
    on the Blender Wiki.

## NLA Editor

The NLA ("Non-Linear Animation") Editor
![](Blender270NLAEditorIcon.png "Blender270NLAEditorIcon.png")
represents a different way of setting up an animation: instead of
thinking of it as a single linear sequence of keyframes, you break it up
into *actions*, which are separate sequences that can be arranged in
various ways. You can also duplicate an action any number of times,
position the copies at different times in the overall animation, and
even attach them to different objects. But they still share a single set
of FCurve contents, which you can edit in the Graph Editor as you would
a monolithic linear animation sequence, and your changes will take
effect in all copies of the action.

To edit the contents of an action in the Graph Editor, you select the
action and  into "tweak mode" (analogous
to Edit mode in the 3D view).  again
takes you out of Tweak mode.

However, the Action Editor submode of the Dope Sheet now becomes useful,
for creating new actions. These start out initially empty of any
keyframes or FCurves, but you can add these in Tweak mode.

-   **See Also:** NLA
    Editor
    on the Blender Wiki.

## To Summarize\...

The above description may seem rather confusing in places. Basically,
there are two ways to organize your animation:

-   Linear, as a single sequence of FCurves and keyframes
-   Non-linear, as a sequence of actions, each consisting of a sequence
    of FCurves and keyframes. The nonlinear data can be further divided
    into multiple overlapping *tracks*, which combine together at any
    moment in time to produce the complete animation.

Objects that can have animation data attached to them can have both
kinds, linear and nonlinear. You can even attach both kinds at once,
though then the linear animation data takes precedence. It is easy to
change your mind and switch back and forth; typically, the development
of a simple animation might start out linear, then change to nonlinear
as it gets more complicated.

