Pose Shape Keys ​

Table of Contents ​

• Installation
• Basic Workflow
• Example Use Cases

This addon lets you create shape keys that blend already deformed meshes into a previously stored shape. It also lets you manage multiple copies of a shape key together. Each copy can have a different vertex group mask, or be applied mirrored around the X axis.

You can find a detailed video tutorial on how to download, install and use the addon here.

Installation ​

1. Download latest release
2. Launch Blender, navigate to Edit > Preferences select Addons and then Install,
3. Navigate to the downloaded add-on and select Install Add-on

Basic Workflow: ​

• Create a pose whose deformation you want to correct. A pose is defined as an Action and a frame number.
• Create a Pose Key on the deformed mesh. Assign the action and the frame number.
• Press "Store Evaluated Mesh". This will create a copy of your mesh with all deformations applied.
• Sculpt this mesh into the desired shape.
• Go back to the deformed mesh, and assign one or more Shape Keys to the Pose Key.
• Press "Set Pose" to ensure that the rig is in the pose you created and specified earlier.
• Press "Overwrite Shape Keys".
• When you activate your shape key, your deformed mesh should now look identical to your sculpted shape.
• If you have more than one shape key, the same data will be pushed into each. The purpose of this is that each copy of the shape key have a different mask assigned to it. This can streamline symmetrical workflows, since you can push to a left and a right-side shape key in a single click.

Example use cases: ​

1. Sculpted facial expressions applied directly on top of a bone deformation based rig: ​

• A character artist can sculpt facial expressions to great quality and detail
• You pose the rig to be as close to this sculpted shape as possible, and create a rig control that blends into this pose using Action Constraints.
• Using the addon, create corrective shape keys that blend your posed mesh into the shape of the sculpt.
• Hook up those corrective shape keys to the rig via drivers
• You now have the precise result of the sculpted facial expression, while retaining the freedom of bone-based controls that can move, scale and rotate!

2. Author finger correctives 24 at a time: ​

• Create a pose where all fingers are bent by 90 degrees at the first joint.
• Create a Pose Key and a storage object, and sculpt the desired deformation result.
• On the rigged mesh, create 24 shape keys within the PoseKey; One for each section of each finger.
• Assign vertex groups to them that mask each finger.
• Normalize the vertex masks.
• Now you can push the sculpted hand shape into all 24 shape keys at the same time.
• Create drivers so each shape key is driven by the corresponding finger bone.
• You can now tweak and iterate on the sculpted shape, and update all 24 shape keys with the click of a single button.

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Changelog ​

0.0.3 - 2023-08-02 ​

FIXED ​

• Fix Changelog Rendering (#125)
• Fix Typo in README
• Fix line ends from DOS to UNIX (#68)

0.0.2 - 2023-06-02 ​

DOCUMENTED ​

• Initial release