Animation in Nuke

Hello everybody, and welcome to this introduction to the new Dope Sheet feature inside of Nuke 6.2. The addition of a Dope Sheet greatly enhances user interaction when dealing with animation times, keyframe management, and basic temporal adjustments of Read nodes. Until now, our main method of manipulating keyframes and animation times inside of Nuke has been in here - the Curve Editor, which is an excellent interface for crafting animation curves, but is far less suited to accurate manipulation of keyframe timings. This is often due to having multiple parameters and multiple animation curves open at once in the Curve Editor for reference. Soon it becomes cluttered and it becomes difficult to isolate which keyframe is relevant to which parameter. Now, the Dope Sheet greatly simplifies this by offering a view of keyframes over time without their corresponding curves. Each keyframe is represented by a gray dot in its position in time, and you can view your key parameters either at root level, at its most simplistic form, where each entry represents a node and demonstrates all of its animated parameters within it, or if you need to do more complex tweaking, you can then dial down inside of each node to view each individual keyed parameter.

This works with all nodes, whether they be 3D or 2D. If you are working on a stereoscopic project, you can dial down inside a Grade node, for example. Here, that has been split off and animated differently for left and right eye, and in its most complex you can delve down inside of a Roto shape, inside of its curves, and then have access to each individual control point. Then, even delve down inside that to view each of its individual tangents and feathering tangents. So, as you can see, it really is a very, very complex diagram that can also be used in a very simple fashion to give you an overview of your animation timing throughout your entire project.

When you first append a node to a tree, you will see in the Dope Sheet that it doesn't show you any information about that node. This is because the Dope Sheet only displays information about animated parameters. If I set a key, you will see the Transform node automatically now turns up inside of the Dope Sheet. If I close this Properties Bin, you will see the information now disappears. So, by default, the Properties Bin defines whether or not something shows in the Dope Sheet, as long as it has an animated parameter. Sometimes, you may want to have your Properties Bin closed but still retain the information in the Dope Sheet. To do this, you can select a node, press Alt+D, and that will add and lock that node’s information inside of the Dope Sheet, regardless of whether the Properties Bin is open. This can then allow you to continue animating parameters when using this as a reference, and you can then choose to get rid of it by selecting it and pressing Alt+D to remove it from the Node Graph. Alternatively, if your Properties Bin is already open, you can either hover over it and press Alt+D and this will also lock your parameters into your Dope Sheet, or you can use a visual method here by clicking on the Node tab, and you can see there is an entry (always in dope sheet) that allows you to toggle on and off that connection with the Dope Sheet. So, I can turn it off here and on, and with it off you can see that if I close down that Properties Bin, it clears it out once again.

Now, to truly see the benefits in the way the Dope Sheet works, we need to see it in unison with the Curve Editor. I’m just going to split this view horizontally and I will drag this Dope Sheet down, giving us more real estate at the top. I will just open the parameters of a few nodes here, like so. You can see that we have a Curve Editor and our Dope Sheet open here and, by default, the two navigate completely independently. Down here we have this padlock icon. If I select that and begin to move, our two views now navigate in synchronization, which makes it much easier to see the relationship between a keyframe in our Dope Sheet and its position on our animation curve in our Curve Editor. Now, within the Dope Sheet, we can do all sort of different tweaks to our animation. For example, I can select a keyframe and drag it around in time. I can select it and nudge it left and right using the number pad on your keyboard. I can double-click on the yellow number here and give it a time to snap to, or I can move things in increments by giving it an incremental number down here and pressing Move. It will continually move by that increment. I could also delete my keyframes in here, which is a definite great addition and that is obviously undoable. You can also add keyframes, so I can press Alt and Apple (Cmd). Interesting what's happened here; you can see we have these half-height gray markers here to depict our keyframes. They have gone half-height because now these exist on fractional frames. If I then select these and move them, you will see now they have all snapped to whole frames and they have retained their full height. Now, for those situations where you do want to work with fractional frames, you can actually hold down Shift and select a key. Now you can see I have the ability to drag that keyframe to any fractional position between two whole numbers. If I let go, it will remain there. If I now want to snap it back to a whole number, I let go of Shift, click and drag. I can also marquee-select a bunch of keyframes across multiple nodes. I can scale the keys, and I can move them all either using sliding, using the number pad, or using our move incremental. There are lots of different ways in which you can edit your keyframes.

Now, to show you the complexity of animation timing that you can adjust using the Dope Sheet, I’m going to show you this very simple example of an animated Roto shape, as a Roto shape actually contains an immense amount of animatable parameters. I’m going to go into the Dope Sheet, zoom in, and go inside the Roto shape, then I will drill all the way down into the curve. You can see here I have 4 entries, starting at 0, that represent the 4 control points of my shape, 0 being this one at the bottom. Now this on its own gives me great control as it allows me to animate or retime the position of this keyframe just for the one control point, but I can actually go further than that and drill down and get access to all of the parameters that make up this 1 control point. For example, I have access to the main control point here, as well as its main feather, as well as individually the left and right tangents of each of these two components. For example, I can go in here and select my main y axis, as it’s only animating on one axis, and if I adjust this, I am just adjusting the timing of the main control point. If I use feather main y, I am now just adjusting the timing of the feather main point. Now, for really added complexity, I can select here - I’m going to actually just break the tangent on this left-hand feather. I’m going to move to another frame and just add a piece of animation. Now, I can go into my feather left x and y here, and I can actually adjust the timing of that one tangent or that left-hand side of the tangent of just the feather control point. And I have that detail of adjustment on all of the different tangent sides for this 1 control point, as well as all the others. Now, that’s an incredible amount of detail that you can go into using the Dope Sheet and very fine adjustments you can make to animation timings.

Now, the final feature of the Dope Sheet that I would like to show you is its visualization of Read nodes. I have a Read node here with its parameters open, and we are used to adjusting the in and out points here in our frame range parameter, and the offset here in the frame parameter. However, the Dope Sheet gives us a visual representation of all of these fields. I can select the Read node and drag it through time and it’s updating, here, our frame position. I can use the handles either end of this to trim the clip, adjusting our frame first and our frame last parameters. This basically gives us the ability to slide around our clip and trim it. This is particularly useful when you have multiple Read nodes, so I will bring the parameters up of these. I look in the Dope Sheet, and you can see that I can very easily build myself and edit out of my Read nodes. It’s quick, it’s intuitive, it’s not a full timeline, but it’s a way of visualizing where your clips are in time, which is incredibly useful, especially if you have multiple clips, as well as multiple parameters animated across different clips.

Once again, each of these Read nodes can be always shown in the Dope Sheet by pressing Alt+D and you can remove that by pressing Alt+D again. You can also use this button here to bring every Read node into the Dope Sheet, so that you can see where they all are in time. It’s a very simple functionality, it’s not a full timeline, but it will definitely speed up parts of your workflow.

So, to conclude, I hope you can see how the Dope Sheet can offer artists a more streamlined and creative environment for adjusting animation timings. From personal production experience, I have already found the Dope Sheet invaluable in a number of situations, mostly when trying to hit specific animation beats, camera work, and when retiming shots. I hope this helps you understand the benefits of this new addition to Nuke. Thanks for listening.