DuSKA - Duduf Shape Keys Animator

DuSKA is an add-on for Blender to help with animation of shape keys.

It is very useful for:

  • Fake Stop-Motion/Claymation.
  • Post-Animation corrective Shape Keys with rigged characters.

Without this add-on, to animate Shape Keys in Blender, you’d have to animate all of their values between 0 and 1, taking care of the mix between them if you’d like to interpolate. DuSKA provides a very simple animatable list with the Shape Keys where you can just select the keys to activate them; DuSKA takes care of the values and interpolations for you.

Installation

DuSKA is installed as any other add-on in Blender: in Preferences ▸ Add-ons, choose install and select the DuSKA .zip archive. Don’t forget to enable the add-on once installed.

Use

3D View ▸ Sidebar ▸ Item tab ▸ Shape Keys Animation

When a compatible object is selected (Curve or Mesh), you can add new Animated Shape Keys with the Shape Keys Animation panel.

  • New Animated Key adds a new Keyframe from the basis.
  • Edit Animated Key activates the Shape Key corresponding to the current Animated Key and switches to Edit mode.
  • Edit Animated Key activates the Shape Key corresponding to the current Animated Key and switches to Sculpt mode.
  • Use the ▲ ▼ Move Key buttons to re-arrange the Animated Keys in the list.

Note

DuSKA‘s list uses the displayed names to pick the right Shape Keys on the object. If a SKA key does not find its counterpart in the Shape Keys (because it has been removed or renamed), a warning sign will be shown. You can either safely remove it, or rename it to link it back to an existing Shape Key.

The menu contains other useful operators.

  • New Animated Key adds a new Keyframe from the basis.
  • New Animated Key from mix adds a new Keyframe from the current Shape Key mix.
  • Add active Shape Key to animation adds the active Shape Key to the list of animated Shape Keys.
  • Remove Animated Key from animation removes the active Animated Key but does not delete the corresponding Shape Key.
  • Delete Shape Key removes the active Animated Key and deletes the corresponding Shape Key.

This list of Shape Keys can be animated, as any other property; you can also add a driver to control it.

When the keyframes are set to Constant interpolation, there will be no transition between keys, which is better for claymation. When set to Linear interpolation (the default), DuSKA will interpolate between keys, which may be better for corrective Shape Keys.

Groups

You can add up to five Animated Key Groups to combine different shape keys and animations, for example to have different shape keys for the left side and the right side of a character.

License

Software

The software this documentation is referring to is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Copyright (C) 2020 Nicolas Dufresne and Contributors.
This program is free software; you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program . If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

GNU GPL3

This Documentation

Copyright (C) 2020 Nicolas Dufresne and Contributors.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “Documentation License”.

GNU GFDL