While there are many different ways of doing shape animation in Softimage, you should understand the basic ways to create shape keys.
The shape manager provides you with an environment for creating, modifying, and animating shapes. To help you work efficiently, you can immediately see the results of the changes in the shape manager as you make them.
For information on this tool, see Using the Shape Manager.
Selecting Target Shapes for Shape Keys
Selecting shape keys lets you set up a series of similar objects deformed in different ways (target shapes) and then create shape keys from them for either a whole object or a cluster.
For more information on this technique, see Selecting Target Shapes to Create Shape Keys.
On the left below, a shape is in a neutral pose, waiting to be deformed with the target shapes.
On the right, target shapes are created in different viseme poses to reflect three phonemes: C, W, and M.
Storing and Applying Shape Keys
Storing and applying shape keys creates (stores) a shape key and immediately applies it to the object at the current frame. This also automatically creates a shape clip for that shape key in the animation mixer.
You can also simply store a shape key at the current frame, but not apply it to the object. This is a useful way of building up a library of stored shapes that you can later apply to the object as you like.
For more information on this technique, see Storing and Applying Shape Keys.
The animation mixer is a powerful tool that gives you a high degree of flexibility in reworking your shape animation in a nonlinear way. Because shape animation is essentially pose-based, you can easily reorder the poses in time, add new poses, reuse the same pose several times, and mix the poses together as you like, all in the animation mixer.
You can even add audio clips to the animation mixer to synchronize your shape animation to sound, such as for lip syncing.
See Using the Animation Mixer for Shape Animation for more information.
Using Slider Panels for Shape Weighting
Although the animation mixer calculates all shape animation, you don't need to actually open it to do shape animation.
When you create shape keys in mixed weight mode, a custom parameter set of the weights is created for the object. This set contains proxies of each shape's weight parameters that are in the mixer.
As well, you can set up your own slider panel for any shape-animated object you like.
See Mixing Shape Weights in a Custom Parameter Set for more information.
