[Bf-modeling] Shape key workflows

[Michael Williamson]

Shape keys in blender are dramatically better than they ever used to be 
and the toolset is quite rich now...

Here are a few thoughts on this though:

*1: Shape key modifier*
A modifier for a  shape key is on paper not as good as the blender's 
current shape keys.. you can't change topology for example, it'll break 
vertex order.. it clutters the scene...

BUT it is extremely powerful for mixing rigs and also for vertex cache 
systems like mdd..
Imagine duplicatig a mesh and  rigging each mesh in a  totally different 
way...

eg:
  mesh 1: generic humanoid armature
mesh 2: cast modifier
mesh 3: broad 3 bone armature for scaling..

A 4th mesh could have a shape key modifier for each mesh above  to 
arbitrarily mix the results of any/all of these rigs..
With drivers this is super powerful (technique taken from teh latest 
revision of Jason Osipa's excellent STOP STARING book..

I've seen this technique used in games studios.. Ninja theories Heavenly 
sword used it to share rigs between many models (most character models 
had identical topology)


*2:Symmetry*
the mirror modifier is the "go to" solution for creating symetric meshes...
because not all the tools work with symettry it's easy to lose it when 
you want it  especially when creating shape keys..

In this case deleting half the mesh and using the mirror mod to restore 
symmetry is too destructive to be a viable fix

I've tried hacks before like exporting a shape key as an OBJ  making it 
symmetrical using teh dyntopo sym tool and then using shrinkwrap to snap 
vertices back to the mirrored position.. or just mirroring teh duplicate 
mesh and manually snapping vertex by vertex..

Your idea of restoring symmetry on selected parts of a mesh would be 
great here..  not sure how that works if topology gets out of line.. but 
I'm VERY interested in this.

A couple of points here:
*
**3 Applying shape keys:*
You can always take two topologically identical but different shaped 
meshes and transfer selected to active to make one a shape key of the 
other..  a real life saver this!
 From time to time I'be used this to freeze a shape set into individual 
objects,  so I can perform an operation that can't be done with shape 
keys.. then after I can restore my shape set.  The trouble is that 
taking an object and applying some or all shape keys is convoluted..  my 
best workaround here is to export as an obj and re- import.  An easy 
native way of doing this would be good!

I'm sure there used to be a way to export a mesh with shape keys to a 
directory, one obj for each shape key.. can't seem to do that anymore...

*4: Relative shape keys and Multires*
Shrinkwrp is great recently.. a lot of teh old issues have been sorted 
and it's a great way to transfer details from one mesh to another.  
Applying a shrinkwrap to a multires object is a fantastic work flow and 
much easier than baking displacment etc before sculpting in more detail 
in your retopo's multires object.

Because shape keys for animation need to be relative rather than 
absolute so you can mix combinations better applying shrinkwrap  to a 
mesh with shape keys is disallowed..  would be really handy if the base 
cage vertices could be moved in teh basis when applying a shrinkwrap mod 
and those offsets inverted for each of teh shape keys to compensate..
still having higher detail positions transferred to teh multires data..  
would be super handy!




I must say that shapekeys workflow is soooo much better than older 
version  of blender, just thought I'd mention teh above for discussion.
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