Hey guys - I’m a blender newbie and have a question about Shape Keys. I’m trying to design a Chinese butterfly sword and have made the grip and the guard. Each ends with a 32 sided rounded face that I’ve manipulated to create the particular shapes that I want (the grip is a bit of a flattened oval and the guard is just a smaller circle). The two are 90 degrees off of each other as so:
(the actual grip and the guard are hidden in this picture; I’m just focusing on the transition between the two).
I want to make a nice smooth transition from the one circle to the other, and some basic googleing pointed me at the werewolf tutorial and Shape Keys. That’s way more advanced than what I need, but it showed me that Shape Keys can do what I want. I would love for Blender to calculate a set of ovals to create a smooth transition from the starting oval to the circle; I could then just bridge the edge loops between those transitional circles to create the solid shape.
When I try to do this with Shape Keys, it looks like a point along the bottom right of the circle is being mapped to the top of the oval, so there’s an undesired rotation that happens during the transformation with the shape keys. Does anyone know how to straighten this out? At first I was running into issues because the two objects’ origins were different, but I fixed that by joining the two meshes into a single object and then splitting them back out into two different objects again for the Shape Keys… any help would certainly be appreciated!