How to add several shape keys to one slider ?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi there, Im workin on this model and to make a shape key really good I need to
add several shape keys to ONE slider … ? It would be extremly useful as you need
arcs in your shape keys and you can only get that by assigning several shape keys to
one slider …

Hope its do able … or is there a smarter more …blender way of doing this ??

Thanks in advance !

PS I looked through the forum and read the documentation but couldnt find any thing on the subject :frowning:

2

I don’t think you can add several shape keys to one slider. You can, however, add several sliders to one driver. Take a look at “driven shape keys.”

3

hmmmm (darn!) but thanks for telling me :slight_smile: … so now I understand why so many ppl are talking about driven shape keys.

4

See this thread:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=85154

You can Duplicate the Mesh, Copy all Shape Keys to the Duplicate, Set them all to max value, use Apply Deformation script, Set the deform as a Shape and use RVK 1 to RVK 2 to add that Shape to the original Mesh, or something like that.

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5

The above suggestions should answer the question but I’m intrigued by your statement

It would be extremly useful as you need arcs in your shape keys and you can only get that by assigning several shape keys to one slider …
What does that mean?

6

Here’s the problem:
Move a vertex from x=0, y=0 to x=1, y=1. Easy enough to do with a shape key, but the vertex will move along a straight line.

To make the vertex move in a curve, you need two sliders, one to control the x displacement, another to control the y displacement.

Animating with two sliders is twice as much work as animating with one slider, but to put it in more getneral terms, we want one control rather than two controls.

We can do this by tying our x slider control to an object’s x displacement, and tying our y slider to the same object’s y displacement. This object becomes the driver, or the control, for both sliders.

Then, to animate a curved displacement of our vertex, we just move the driver object in the desired curve. This can be done in almost any desired shape using the IPO curves for the driver object.

7

Then, to animate a curved displacement of our vertex, we just move the driver object in the desired curve. This can be done in almost any desired shape using the IPO curves for the driver object.

Now that makes sense because the controller/driver is two-dimensional (could be three-dimensional too I guess)). A single slider however, is one dimensional so would still be incapable of delivering a curved result.