Bone view in dopesheet

Not sure what I have done, but I can only see the rotation/location etc. info in the dope sheet. I cannot see the individual bones and the diamond boxes, so I cannot edit the animations at the moment :confused:


Without a blend file, really hard to tell. Search the outliner to see if the bones are even there. If they are there, are they hidden? Alt H to bring them back.

I’ve noticed that the Active Key Set is set to rotation. Try leaving it blank and move the bones.

Thanks for the replies. The problem was the FBX export (I should have mentioned that, but I didn’t know that was a factor).

There might be a way to export an FBX file from Blender and then import it back into Blender perfectly, but I figured out that it’s better (and faster) just to append. Problem solved :slight_smile:

by the way guys, how do you mark a question as solved in this forum?

The items at the top of the list, without a bone name, are for the armature object. The fact that they show no diamonds means that there are no keyframes set between the first and the last. The fact that it shows an orange bar between the first and the last keyframes means nothing changes between those keyframes. Either ignore them, or delete them, your choice. They provide nothing to the animation. At least that’s how I read it.

As for marking the thread solved… Edit the first post, choose “Go Advanced” if it doesn’t by default. At the top is a drop down to add a prefix to the title. One of the options is [solved].

I spoke too soon! The issue has not been solved, but I’ve found the underlying problem. As much as I love Blender, its method of saving animations in the action editor is a real pain. Even more annoying is the fact that it’s really hard to delete them. The first issue was the result of a previous chest that I had imported but deleted. As a result, the bones had been deleted, but the animations remained. This is why I could not see the individual key frames of the bones in the dope sheet view. Further down the long list of useless animations was the animation data for the non-deleted chest.


I looked on the forums and people say to press ‘shift x’ on all the unwanted actions, save, and then reload. Not only is this tedious, but I cannot get it to work.

How do you delete actions permanently? Why doesn’t Blender delete stored animation data when the associated armature is removed?

You have told Blender to save this data block even if no one is using it. That is what the little F is for to the right of the action name. Unclick it. Then shift X the action. If you pull it up in the action editor and see 0 users then when you save and open it will be gone.

Really handy for storing actions you might want later.

https://www.blender.org/manual/animation/actions.html?highlight=users

Sorry, I should have been more specific. My issue wasn’t with the animations marked with an F, but the ones that were not marked. I click on them, press shift and the X next to the plus sign, and nothing happens. If I click the number to the left of F to make it go away, then shift-x creates a copy of the animation in question and makes that 0.

I’m not sure exactly when, but a feature was added to create stashes for actions that haven’t been marked with a fake user. See if you can find them in the NLA editor. You should see them listed as “action stashes”. Left clicking on the ones you want to get rid of and deleting them should do the trick.

In case you’re wondering why this exists at all, people, myself included, had a habit of working through a session without assigning a fake user to actions. Only to find them gone when they re-opened the file. The stashes were obviously a way to address this. :slight_smile:

Without a stash the actions should revert to a state where you can use shift-x to remove them permanently.

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile: That got rid of some, but there are still some animations left with no stashes (that I can see anyway), and they still don’t become marked with a zero when I shift-x them.