ShapeKeyFX

Shape key animation for impacts, jiggle and ripples

Sculpt the hit once. ShapeKeyFX animates it. Turn any sculpted shape key into a fully timed impact: the surface presses in, lets go, rebounds past rest and wobbles out like real soft tissue, with ripples spreading from the point of contact.

Mark the contact on your timeline, pick a material preset, press Play. No simulation to cache, no drivers, no handlers: just clean shape key keyframes you can render, tweak and export anywhere.

See it in action

01  Timed hits, as many as you need

Scrub to the moment of contact and add a hit. Every hit has its own Contact, Deepest and Release frames plus its own Strength. Stack unlimited hits on the same key: a bouncing ball, a punch combo, a hand patting a belly. Overlapping hits add up naturally.

02  Rebound, jiggle and ripples

After release the surface overshoots into a slight bulge and settles with a damped wobble. You control the Amount, the Frequency in Hz and the Duration in seconds, for the whole track or for a single hit.

Want the impact to travel? One click on Create Wave from Dent builds a ripple shape key from your own sculpt, and ShapeKeyFX rings it outward after every hit.

03  Combine any shape keys

ShapeKeyFX is not limited to impacts. Give any shape key its own track: a lift, a sway, a squash, one key per cheek. Every track has its own hits and material, and Generate All writes them together into one natural, layered motion.

04  8 material presets

Belly, Glute, Breast, Thigh, Muscle, Fat, Face and Rubber. Each preset sets the press curve, the release, the jiggle and the ripple in one click. Tweak anything you like; the reset button next to the preset brings its values back.

05  Kick your bone physics with SpringFX

Already using SpringFX? Switch on SpringFX Kick and every hit also pushes a SpringFX group of bones. Hair, earrings, tails, jiggle bones and accessories react to the impact automatically, at the contact, at the deepest point or at the release, along the direction of the hit or one you choose.

Optional. ShapeKeyFX works fully on its own; the kick needs SpringFX 8.5 or newer.

06  Auto-detect hits from your animation

Already animated a ball, a hand or a prop? Pick it as the Collider, press Detect Hits from Collider, and ShapeKeyFX finds every contact in the frame range and sets each strength from how deep the collider goes.

07  Export to game engines and other apps

Take the exact effect out of Blender. Export it as an Alembic cache (.abc), which Unreal Engine imports natively as a Geometry Cache (Houdini, Maya and most 3D apps read it too), or as an OBJ sequence, one file per frame for custom loaders in Godot, Unity and other engines. Both export the mesh exactly as the viewport shows it: shape keys, armature and every modifier included.

One-click targets for Unreal Engine, Godot, Unity and DAZ Studio set the right units, and OBJ sequences come with a small JSON file (frame rate, range and file list) for importers.

How it works

1. Sculpt the dent on a shape key: a belly pressed by a ball, a cheek pressed by a finger, a cushion hit by a fist.
2. Add a track for that key and mark each hit on the timeline, or detect them from a collider.
3. Pick a material and press Play. With Live Update on, every change rewrites the animation instantly.

Why ShapeKeyFX

• Built for characters. Belly hits, glute and breast impacts, cheek pokes, muscle slaps. Works on any mesh with shape keys: DAZ imports, scans or your own characters.
• Plain keyframes. The result plays and renders without the add-on installed, and exports like any shape key animation, plus one-click Alembic and OBJ sequence export built in.
• Zero playback cost. No handlers, no drivers, no baking step. Scrub, loop and render at full speed.
• Follows your rig. Shape keys deform before the Armature modifier, so every dent moves with the character.
• Safe on your scene. Only touches the keys you assign, refuses keys already animated by another track, warns about drivers and finds renamed keys again.
• One panel, two places. In the 3D Viewport sidebar and in Properties > Object Data, right below your Shape Keys.

What you get

• The ShapeKeyFX add-on, packaged as a Blender extension (install from disk in seconds).
• Full documentation in the Documentation tab of this page.

Compatibility: Blender 4.4 and newer, tested on 5.2 LTS. Windows, macOS and Linux.

Support: message me here on Superhive or join the community Discord, The Misfit's Corner.

Made by Auron3D, the creator of SpringFX.