[Bf-committers] Adding bone shape keys for easier support of character morphing

[Gaia]

I wonder if blender could get skeleton shape keys
for bone length changes.

A typical usage would be character morphing, for example
changing a character's arm length also needs  changing the
arm bones lengths along with the mesh shape .

Other tools like DAZ Studio provide character morphing
features which also seem to directly change the skeleton,
one nice example for how far this can go is the DAZ
genesis-character. Here is what DAZ studio provides:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTBBnc2SJ90

Actually we have programmed this feature into our Blender
Addon "Avastar",  but it is made for one particular rig and it
is insanely slow because it needs to recalculate the mesh shape
whenever a bone length changes and the access to the needed
data seems to be extremely slow. Here is what we can currently
do with our own addon (by far not as impressive as the DAZ tool):

   http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/custom-shape-sliders/

So ... I think it would be really cool if blender provides some
tools for implementing character morphing.

One idea out of the blue:

Skeleton shape keys work exactly like shape keys,
there is a skeleton-basis and one or more skeleton-shapes
with corresponding shape sliders.

And a mesh could be tied to the bone shape via its bone weights.

cheers,
Gaia