A number of years ago (2018, to be exact) I got frustrated by the apparent lack of additive blendshapes within After Effects. I had no idea that Joysticks ‘n Sliders over on AEScripts was what I was looking for, so I decided I should just write my own blendshape engine. The underlying blendshape script was fairly quick to impliment and I had it working for the job I was on at the time, but having a simple manager to edit the blendshapes took much, much longer. I hated the idea of using keyframes to set any form of “target”, so I built the manager around duplicating shape paths. It was a dumb way to do it. Little did I know that my aversion to keyframes would end up making it rather ardous task, and one that ultimately would be somewhat limiting for large-scale rig setups as you have to work on one shape at a time. Editing poses that involve more than a few shapes becomes more than a little laborious. Using a keyframe-as-a-target option (a-la JnS) would have been far better for rig management. Still, I figured I would persist out of sheer bullheadedness and wanted to push myself with a side project. Despite many delays and letting it sit on the sidelines for far too long, I finally got a the manager working to a point that I feel happy to have it let go in the wild. Joysticks ‘n Sliders is much fuller featured and has a better management method in place so I would still recommend using that over this, but for anyone who cares to, you are welcome to play around with my manager. I hope you find it useful!
Find it over on Gum Road, under a “pay what you want” offering. Free! But any donations would of course be appreciated. Basic Workflow:
make a shape
load and initialise the shape group as a blendshape
duplicate the base shape path any number of times (either in the timeline or via the manager) and edit each to make a target shape
add the targets
animate on the AE slider effects directly, or make controllers and link to different directions to control more than one slider at a time.
I’ve found it works faster in 8bit mode with the Quality/Sampling option on the controllers set to low, but my video below has things in high quality and 32bit, so gets a little sluggish by the end of the setup. I have no fancy demo video with fun music to show off what it does, but here’s a little screen capture I’ve done to show the workflow: