Shapekeys and armatures

Hi, I’m trying to rig a character model of a robot for VRChat and I’m trying to make some custom animations for this model.

It has a few opening panels and a folding blade in one arm.

I have the character all rigged, but now I’m trying to setup shapekeys for the moving parts.

I’ve been told that I’m doing this wrong and that I should be using key frames to animate my model. But I’m not making an animation, I’m making a game character, and VRChat uses shapekeys for custom animations.

Keyframes allows me to move the parts but I can’t see a way for me to set those as a shapekey.

Moving the meshes for the objects and creating shapekeys manually doesn’t work correctly either.
If I set the mesh destination, then try to pose the character, the object then warps to that point instead of opening like it should.

What I have tried so far:

Setting a shapekey for the item, making a driver for it, assigning the armature and bone for the driver and it’s intended use.

This bears no fruit. I try to change the shapekeys value and nothing happens.

I’ve also tried using the driver constraint addon.

This just gives me an odd error message and I get no result.

Can anyone help?

Welcome to BA!

You cannot use shapekeys to rotate parts of a mesh, because the vertices affected by the shapekeys will always move in a straight line from rest position (shapekey value 0) to applied position (shapekey value 1) or anything in between. I know nothing about VRChat, so cannot help further, other than to say you need to find a way to use object rotation, based on different meshes for each part, or armatures.

Cheers, Clock.