I have a problem with a scene i’m animating as follows. I have animated the shape keys of a proxy object. Now, I would like the animated shape keys in the proxy object to drive the shape keys in the final object.
I realise I can simply copy and paste the keys but I would like to see if this is possible. I’ve been experimenting with this for the past hour and I can’t get it to work. I’ve even tried to get a shape key to drive the rotation of an object but it doesn’t seem to work.
Here is a solution using drivers… The first cubes shapekeys are keyframed. I have driven a property ProxyShape1 copying this value. The other cube uses the propertys value to drive its shape.
The property isn’t required, but I suggest you start using properties to drive shapekeys. (Key in the property values and drive the key from the prop… hope this makes sense hehe) Then transferring drivers between them becomes very simple… and also makes complimentary shape drivers simpler… eg mouth open mouth closed. shapes can be driven by one property and the other shape by 1 minus its value. Cessan posted a great mouth rig using this technique.
Also it’s not a bad idea to use a completely seperate object to hold properties like an empty. It still seems to work ok if you don’t but if they are on the same object you can come across the dreaded cyclic redundancy warning messages… Setting up a controller this way lends itself perfectly to using proxy obs.
I must thank you for your quick reply and for providing an example file, it took me a little while to get my head around but in the end I can see exactly how your solution works.
It has got me thinking though. This solution has quite a few steps and it would be nice to have a simple plugin that passes the values from one element to another. Is there any such plugin or script that has this functionality or is it best to do it this way?
Yeah could write a script I suppose… still finding bpy.ops a bit tricky getting context right.
The concept is to set it up once really and drive everything with the properties… then just copy and paste drivers. There may be a way to paste multiple drivers using the graph editor. Been applying properties/drivers method to a car rig that only needs brake and accelerator… coming along Ok but the soft body independant suspension is a biatch… like the cloth modifier worked best the first time, all subsequent tweaks and fiddling turned it to …
