Common Controls and Tips

All of these editors have some common controls. Not only can you move (G) or duplicate (Shift + D) things the same way as in other Blender editors, but you can also take advantage of some other common navigation features.

You can pan to see other parts of the time (horizontal) and values (vertical) with MMB click and drag.

Use the Scroll Wheel to zoom in and out.

Press Home to adjust the zoom automatically to show the whole animation time range.

Another way to zoom is to press Ctrl + MMB and drag your mouse. In some editors, you can only zoom horizontally, but in the Graph Editor you can zoom horizontally and vertically.

Using Alt + Scroll Wheel takes you to the next or previous keyframes, a fast way to scrub through your animation (in small steps).

There are some options you might want to check out that can make working with these editors easier:

In the headers of most of the animation editors, there is an icon that shows a mouse cursor. If you enable that option, you’ll only see the keyframes of currently selected objects, which can prevent you from going crazy looking at dozens (or hundreds) of curves or keyframes at the same time. It will also help you recognize what you’re currently seeing in those editors, as all of the unselected objects will be ignored and hidden.

In the View menu on the Curve Editor header, you can enable the option Only Selected Curves Keyframes. This option will display only the keyframes of the curves from properties you select on the list, preventing you from selecting or accidentally moving keyframes of other curves that are overlapping the one you want to adjust.

Also in the Curve Editor, you can find the Normalize option on the header. When you’re working with different curves that have completely different ranges, it can be hard to navigate, as you have to zoom in and out constantly to see the part of the curves on which you need to work. When Normalize is enabled, the curves are all adjusted to fit inside a 0 to 1 range for easier adjusting. This change is only visual in the Graph Editor; it doesn’t affect the real values of the curves.