
Doing so will reveal the curves for any blend shape that has keys on it. To access the blend shape curves you have to open up the mesh hierarchy. By default you'll only see a curve for normal meshes or joints. While this is useful, the recommended way to adjust and edit blend shapes is through the Graph Editor. You'll now see keyframes associated with each shape appear in the timeline. Now select your mesh, go to the Channel box and select the keyed blend shapes. In the pop-up menu make sure you highlight From Channel Box and Selected. To display the key ticks, right-click the timeline, and go to Display Key Ticks. The main issue with this method of keyframing is that unlike normal animation in Maya, the key ticks don't appear by default. This dialog contains the sliders associated with your blend shape, and under these sliders you'll see a Key button that enables you to control the amount of influence each shape has along the time slider. First, open up the Blend Shape dialog by going to Window>Animation Editors>Blend Shape. Key blend shapesĪdding keys to a blend shape is also a very straightforward process. Enter a name for your blend shape, leave the settings at their defaults and click Create. Now go to Create Deformer>blend shape>Option. Simply select one or more of the target meshes, then hold down Shift and click your base mesh. Now, when you select an object you can see its vertex count.Ĭreating a blend shape is a straightforward process. If you’re unsure about the vertex count, you can check it by going to Display>Heads Up Display>Poly Count.

The way to ensure that you have the same vertex count on the base and target meshes is to duplicate the base mesh and use that as the target mesh, which is standard practice for creating blend shapes. In order for a blend shape command to be successful, the base mesh and any target shapes being used must have the same vertex count, otherwise Maya will kick out an error or simply not carry out the operation. The first and possibly the most important of these considerations is the vertex count. Before you create a blend shape, you first have to take into account a few considerations about the geometry that you want to blend between.
