Skip to content

dopesheetFlow

A real light table for Grease Pencil, inside Blender's own Dope Sheet.

dopesheetFlow turns the Dope Sheet into an "xsheet": every Grease Pencil key is shown as an actual thumbnail of the drawing, per layer, aligned to frames, with a hold-duration ruler between instances — the same workflow as other 2D animation software, as a simple overlay on Blender's own native Dope Sheet.

No new editor: a band is drawn over the existing channel column, with its own Scene / Summary / group / layer hierarchy, toggled from a button in the Dope Sheet header.

Overview of the xsheet overlay in the Dope Sheet

Presentation video

At a glance

  • Real thumbnails, generated by direct GPU rasterization of the Grease Pencil strokes (not a full render), with caching and asynchronous generation to stay responsive even on dense drawings.
  • Full hierarchy: a Scene row (composite of every visible GP object), a Summary row (composite of one object's layers), groups and layers — each with its own composite thumbnail, each independently toggleable.
  • Drag a key with two modes (trim / ripple), cross-layer and cross-group multi-selection, and group-as-parent dragging (moving a group's thumbnail moves the real key on every child layer).
  • Alt + hover for an enlarged floating preview of any thumbnail.
  • Isolate any row with one click (a real Blender hide, stacking with Shift+click across multiple rows).
  • Channel color and keyframe type, editable right from the overlay.
  • Rename a layer or group by double-clicking its name.
  • 3D viewport scrubbing: hold a customizable key to bring up a thumbnail scrubber near the cursor, without leaving the 3D view.

See the Features page for a full visual walkthrough.

Why it feels native

dopesheetFlow doesn't introduce a new editor or a parallel data model — Blender doesn't allow custom editor spaces in Python, and this add-on doesn't need one. Everything it shows and moves is a real Grease Pencil layer, group or keyframe. Turn the overlay off from the header button and the Dope Sheet is exactly Blender's own, channels and all.

Requires Blender 5.2 or newer.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later — SPDX: GPL-3.0-or-later.

dopesheetFlow is part of the SlateFlow suite.

Support

slateFlow is developed in my spare time, alongside my freelance work. Prices are deliberately affordable: in return, I can't commit to fix deadlines or on-demand development. Feedback and ideas are welcome — the most important bugs will be fixed, and good ideas will make their way in. Thank you for your understanding.

Found a bug? See Reporting a bug for what to include.