Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Using corrective shape keys

The ability to create bones that deform a mesh is great, but that alone doesn't solve all our rigging problems. Some may argue that it's possible to create perfect deformations in every movement of your character just with lots of extra bones and even more detailed weight painting, but that's too time consuming. We want our rigs ready to be animated in a short amount of time. We care about our character looking good on screen, not the purity of the technique.

That's why we can solve some trickier rigging problems with corrective Shape Keys. Shape Keys are saved states of our character's mesh, with the position of each vertex stored in the computer's memory. We're going to create some custom deformations in our character ...