Shape Keys Newbie Question

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!

Shapekeys give a linear translation and are to change one shape to another, not to create additional gemoetry

Use the ‘Bridge Edge Loops’ option http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Editing/Edges#Bridge_Edge_Loops


or Loop Tools addon http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/LoopTools

Thanks for your advice! I feel really dumb for not noticing the “number of cuts” setting. I think that the positioning of my two ends is too close for Blender to deal with, as I end up with some creased geometry when I try using the Bridge Edge Loops option:


If I scoot the circles further apart, it works like a champ.

I tried using the bridge option from LoopTools but, despite looking like a good starting point for me in Edit mode, going back to object mode displays a cone pointing to the center of a flat plane:


Do you know of anything else that I can try or any way for me to better use these tools? Thanks again for your help, I really appreciate it.

Sorry, I can’t edit my previous reply until it gets moderated… please disregard the weird geometry that I was seeing when I was using Loop Tools; I didn’t realize that I still had a Shape Key on one of the circles from a previous test. When I removed that Shape Key, the Loop Tools bridging created a multi-segmented bridge that’s pretty nice, although not quite as curved as I’d like (it’s close enough that I should be able to finesse that by hand).

Generally this sort of thing is best done using bevel and taper objects along a curve.
Since you are pretty new to Blender you may not have seen how this works, but here’s a short video that explains it.
Good to know even if you don’t end up using it for this project, but chances are you can use it.