So yeah no? Is there a way to animate multiple points of a relative shape key or not?
It doesn’t seem unreasonable given there’s already a keyframe feature built into blender.
If you still don’t understand the issue, imagine a simple translation. At at shape key value of 0, it corresponds to your basis. At 0.25, you decide to move the vertices left by 1 unit. Now normally, blender would automatically apply this transformation at 1.00 for reasons beyond comprehension.
HOWEVER, suppose you want to also have the vertices then move up by 1 unit at 0.50, then move the vertices right by 1 unit at a shapekey value of 0.75, then down 1 unit at 1.00.
Then at 1.00, the vertices should be exactly where they started, but if you animated that shapekey value between 0 and 1, the vertices would run through the translation cycle.
This effectively bakes a small animation using the deformation itself so that you don’t have to composite it over several different shape keys but will still be composable with other shapekey deformations. Is there a way to do that?