Shape Key Manager PRO is designed to speed up your shape key rigging workflow. It allows you to duplicate and/or mirror your shape keys while maintaining and retarget their drivers.

Have you ever finished rigging setting up the drivers for one side of your character only to have to repeat the same tedious workflow for the other side. With this addon you can accomplish the task in less than a minute.

WHAT CAN IT DO

Duplicate Shape Keys - Duplicating a shape key in Blender is a bit of a process. You have to turn off all shape keys besides the one that you want to duplicate and then navigate the menu to create a new shape key from mix. This isn't too bad until you have multiple shape keys to duplicate. With this addon it is as simple as selecting the shape key you want duplicated or filling out the filter for multiple shape keys to be duplicated and then it is a single click.

Mirror Shape Keys - Mirroring shape keys is just as slow and often prone to missing vertices. Just as with duplicating this addon makes the workflow much faster and more reliable.

Duplicate and Mirror Shape Keys - The real workhorse of this addon. Both duplicate and mirror a shape key or multiple shape keys by a filter with 1 click.

Assign New Vertex Group - This option will put the selected vertex group to any new duplicated shape key. This is especially helpful if you have a vertex group controlling the influence to the left or right side of the mesh.

Copy and Rename Drivers - Copying a driver is a real time sink in Blender. You have to jump from window to window, copy and pasting, and changing names of bones and paths, . With a proper naming convention (".L" for left side bones and shape keys and ".R" for right side bones and shape keys, or similar) you can automatically change the drivers bone/path from one side to the other

Copy Other Objects to Shape Keys or Other Object Shape Keys- This is useful when importing objects from other software that have morph targets as separate objects. With 1 click you turn all selected objects with matching vertex indices to shape keys on the active object.

UPDATE #1

UPDATE 1.1:

Driver Creation Tool - This tool is in a beta version and will undergo changes. It allows you to add a driver to the selected shape key. You have the standard variable types and settings for controlling the influence.

Variable Factor - The driver is multiplied by the factor

Variable Reverse Influence - This will reverse the influence of the driver. So if the driver is driven by the X Location it will be an influence of 1.0 at 0 X location and 0.0 influence at the Variable Factor X location

Driver Expression - Allows you to create a custom expression for the driver. This overrides the other 2 settings

Copy Shape Keys from Objects with Mismatching Data:

This option allows you to copy shape keys from one object to another regardless of mismatching vertex count. The way it works is you add a temporary shape key to the target object and using proportional editing you move the object around to match the source object as closely as possible. It will grab the nearest vertex on the source object for mapping the shape keys. For best results I suggest putting a subsurf modifier on the source object to make it denser and smoother results.

Limit to Selected Vertices - This will limit the copying to only the selected vertices in the target object. This is to prevent areas from getting unwanted deformations in the shape keys.

Smoothing Iterations - This will add iterations of corrective smooth to the transferred result to help smooth any poor results.

UPDATE 1.2:

2 New features added

Parent Child Shape Keys:

This allows you to establish Parent Child relationships between the shape keys in an object. The use of this is for deformation based shape keys. If you have a shape key for the shape of the biceps and forearms when the elbow is fully bent you can have a duplicate of it that uses a vertex group to only effect the left side of the character. Then on the other shape key the vertex group would only effect the right side of the character. With a parent child relationship established you can use the Refresh Relationship operator to push the changes from the parent shape key to the child shape key. 

This allows you to have multiple copies of 1 shape key will only having to edit the parent. Elsewise if you made any changes to the parent you would have to re-setup the child shape keys with the drivers and vertex groups.

Explode Shape Keys into Separate Objects:

This operator allows you to separate every shape key on the object into an individual object.

Apply Vertex Group Weights - This option will apply the weights of the vertex group assigned to the individual shape keys when turning them into individual objects.

UPDATE 1.3:

Updated for support in Blender 2.80! Reworked the UI to make it take up less space and have a better order to the options. Removed the Driver Creation Tool as 2.8 natively has some good driver creation tools accessibly from the shape key list.

Demo Model acquired from BenDansie
Released under
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Downloaded from http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/7093