Pose Deformers in Blender?

Is there a workflow in Blender that replicates the Pose Deformer workflow in Maya?

ie:Can you pose an armature, sculpt a corrective shape on the deformed mesh and add that as a shapekey that is driven by a selected bone’s angle? As you bend the joint say, an elbow, the shape key winds in and out (0 to 100), driven by the armature.

It’s a great workflow for adding muscles or tendons or correct deformations on shoulders/elbows etc.

~Glenn

short answer is yes,
there are shape keys in blender,

Yeah, I know that, I talk about them in my post. I mean I want shape keys that are driven by the changing angle between two bones.

~Glenn

What you are calling Pose Deformer in Maya is called driven shapekeys (or is it shapekey drivers …?) in Blender .

Basically you create a shapekey for your rigged mesh then go to the IPO window and select the “Shape” IPO type and add a simple 2 key curve with Ctrl-LMB (you can clean it up for exact input by using the Transform Properties subwindow - you need that open to add the driver any way) and then add driver/select your armature name in the OB: field/select Pose from the driver channel type/add the name of the bone you want to drive the shape with (under the armature name)/and select the pose channel type you want to drive the shapekey …

Here is a simple example . The BICEP_BULGE shapekey is diven by the (negative) Z rotation of the ULNA bone . You can go beyond the 1.0 shape influence on the curve (or even negative values) for interesting effects …

Attachments

driven_shapekey.blend (158 KB)

Many thanks Vertex Pusher. Exactly how I imagined it would work. I tried much the same thing but failed dismally to get it to work. I’ll pull your test apart tonight.

~Glenn