Put the power back into your shape keys

If you're switching to Blender coming from Maya, and especially if you work with blendshapes often, one important piece of functionality you may have found missing in Blender is the ability to create multi-key blendshapes. Being able to drag a single slider, and transitioning linearly through many different shape keys can be really powerful, and unfortunately Blender is simply missing that ability. For some of us, that ability is crucial. FBX files -- which are still one of the most common 3D file types in use today, have built-in support for it. -- Blender should support that functionality too.

And yes, you can manually set up drivers that do something similar, but some of us like it to be quick and easy, as well as like it to work with other software out of the box. That's where this addon comes in.

Advanced Blendshape Editor is a drop-in replacement for Blender's shape key editor, that gives you much more power and control over your shape keys. You can set up as many shape keys as you like for one "channel" at different weights, and blend through all of them as you move the channel's one respective slider.

The real magic comes in the I/O.

It comes with an external embedded binary containing the official FBX SDK, allowing you to export (or patch existing) FBX files with multi-key blendshapes with ease, as well as allowing a pre-import step that unpacks multi-key blendshapes from existing FBX files for use with this plugin, and prevents them from being discarded by Blender's base FBX importer.

Features:

• Full drop-in replacement UI over the 3D viewport for creating, sculpting, renaming, deleting, and duplicating shape keys.

• Exported FBX is fully compatible with any software that supports multi-key blendshape animation on FBX (Unity, Maya, and more)

• Works with animation (and non-destructively bakes the blendshape data accordingly when exported from the addon UI)

• Supports Windows, Linux and Apple Silicon Mac!

• Additionally supports the "Better FBX Importer/Exporter" addon if you have it installed, for both importing and exporting FBX files. (Not affiliated however with the author in any way, I just really like their plugin)

• Supports patching an FBX file instead of directly exporting it, in case you have other plugins you need to export your base FBX with but still want the functionality offered by this plugin.

• Import any FBX file with pre-existing multi-key blendshapes without Blender destroying the inbetween keys

Limitations:

• The export/import functionality requires the use of the addon's own FBX export/import buttons, which may be inconvenient if you have other addons that you use to export to FBX. As much as I would have liked to have tied it in with the standard import/export functions, that is functionality that doesn't exist in Blender either.

• Currently requires Blender 4.2 and above, though this may change in the future to support previous versions.