Mute keyframes?

Is there a way to mute (meaning temporarily deactivate) keyframes in the Graph Editor?

I’m guessing there’s not, but asking just in case someone knows of a way.

I have to temporarily modify my animation for a specific render pass and would prefer not to do a destructive edit if I don’t have to.
Destructive edits mean having to fork the project file into more versions.
More version forks means more confusion when revisiting a project and seeing the version progression is not linear.

Thanks.

No idea, but that is a good question. Try using the dope sheet and the graph editor and pressing H to hide the ones you don’t want. Might have no effect at all, but most of blenders tools work across all windows. Try also ctrl h and alt h. This is just a wild guess. I have no idea really.

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave it a try but it doesn’t work.
But if they were to implement it using H to hide then it would break a convention since hiding never hides anything from rendering, only viewing. Also there would be no way to see that there is hidden data and it would be a confusing implementation. So I’m sort of glad they didn’t do it like that. Still it would be nice to have a mute keyframes feature, maybe with a red box appearing around the muted ones… my suggestion in case any devs come upon this thread, heheh.

What I ended up doing is adding a Lock Location Constraint to the moving object, this way I can get back my original animation curves by toggling off the constraint.
The other animation was on the camera, so I duplicated my existing camera, set it as the Active Camera, cleared it of its animated parameters and made a new target Empty for it to follow. A fine solution in this case.

It’s always good to add keyframes on separate actions so you can work on each other independently. There might even be a away to copy and paste keyframes across actions. Never tried this.

Right. Good point. Well you could select the keyframes you want to temporarily deactivate and slide them outside the range of animation, for example before frame 1.
Maybe add a marker [M key] on the timeline to notate where those keyframes originally were from.
Still not ideal, but workable.

As for copying keyframes, Shift+D will Duplicate any selected frames.

Well, I just tried it, it works, except corresponding channels have to be present beforehand (ie keyed) in the dopesheet, otherwise pasting will fail. If different channels are present keys will be pasted anyway. In fact, when I think of it, creating a new action copies the current one, so in order to split keyframes between different actions one just needs to copy the current action and delete every keyframe but those needed.

Just noticed, it is possible to mute entire channels in both the graph editor and dopesheet. Shift+w with cursor hovering the channel list.

Muting individual keyframes would be much more useful than muting entire channels.

1 Like

I’m reviving the topic. How are things going with the disabling animation keys in version 2.8 now?
Is there development in this direction? Is there this very important feature on the wish list?

I love to be able to do this too. New to Blender, but 30 years experience with DAW’s & NLE’s. Keyframe muting would be very handy to experiment with ideas, without having to keep duplicating tracks/objects etc

This is must have feature! Come on Devs!

I recently suggested LARGER and MORE CONSPICUOUS ‘flags’ for geometry Hiding, and it was not well received.

Anyway, you’d for keyframe hiding you’d really want to make it super obvious, because the confusion factor would be crippling. “Ghosting” might be way better.

But, what would “keyframe hiding” mean? If you can “turn off” an individual keyframe, does the interpolation span the gap, or what?