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All Add-ons

Add-on Pose Shape Keys
Pose Shape Keys

Preserve your shape keys through weight changes, and much more.
Add-on by Mets
About What's New Reviews Version History

What is this?

You're finally done sculpting the deformation correctives of your character rig and it looks great. But oh no. You find some rogue vertex weights or need to change some bone constraints for better behaviour. And now all your sculpted shape keys are messed up and have to be re-done too.

This add-on fixes that by letting you store the final sculpted shapes separately, and re-applying them on top of a modified base mesh. (As long as the topology hasn't changed, of course.)

How to use

  • Read my Blog Post (includes video) to learn how to use the add-on.
  • See the documentation which is kept up to date with the latest features.

Use cases

Besides allowing you to change your weight painting after creating corrective shape keys, the add-on enables various workflows:

  • You can sculpt your facial expressions first, then create Action set-ups that move some deform bones into a similar pose, then blend into the actual pose you sculpted. Now you have the precision of sculpted shape keys, and the control of individual bones.
  • Great support for symmetry workflows. You can author and propagate both sides of your shape keys at once. Just create a mask vertex group for each side, and assign them to your shape keys.
  • Automatic driver set-up. At least for simple cases. Often faster than starting from scratch.
  • You can author multiple shape keys at once, for example by sculpting a Fist shape, that will be broken up to individual finger joint shape keys. You just need to make a mask vertex group for each joint. There is an operator to let you normalize the masks.

Support Us

If you enjoy Pose Shape Keys, consider supporting the Blender Studio, and give a rating!


What's New

1.0.0 July 3rd, 2025

Improve automatic driver set-up:

  • Add "Only Selected" option, so it ignores bones that aren't selected.
  • Add "Side" option, so you can filter left/right side bones. This was already happening based on the name of the shape key, but now it's more transparent, and optional.
  • Fix incorrect activation of the driver by clamping values in the expression, so two negative activations don't multiply together into a positive.
  • Drivers are now initialized with keyframes. (In case you want to make a custom curve)
  • The driver expression can only fit 16 values before it runs out of the 255 character limit. Added an error message to handle this case.

See all versions


Permissions

This extension does not require special permissions.

Developer
Mets
Rating
(5)
Version
1.0.0
Updated
11 mo
Published
July 1st, 2024
Downloads
22905
Size
35.0 KB
Compatibility
Blender 4.2 LTS and newer
Website
studio.blender.org/tools/addons/pose_shape_keys
Report Issues
projects.blender.org/studio/blender-studio-pipeline/issues
License
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
Rigging
...or download and Install from Disk
  • 35.0 KB

Reviews

See all
  • CUK
  • v1.0.0
  • 3 mo

Thanks! Great addon!

  • Seaway
  • v1.0.0
  • 8 mo

The good news of pose shapekey, it solves the trouble of repeated adjustment of pose shapekey!

  • dursunumit
  • v1.0.0
  • 8 mo

Pose Shape Keys Preserve your shape keys through weight changes, and much more.

5.0

5 reviews
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