Shape key help

First time poster, loving blender so far. I cant seem to get shape keys to transfer correctly on two identical meshes. They are both rigged and weighted, but the mesh in the back has shape keys while the mesh in the front does not. Whenever I attempt to xfer a key the mesh receiving the transfer goes haywire. I have included an image. thanks


Hi, welcome.

To transfer a shape key from the back mesh, to the front mesh:
1: First select the back mesh, then select the the shape key to transfer.
2: Shift select the front mesh, Shift+RMB, then from the specials menu, select Transfer Shape Key.

This should only transfer the ‘difference’ of the shape key from the Basis shape key.

On the receiving mesh it looks like the jaw up shape key has distorted the mesh.
Note that Transfer Shape Key only works correctly on meshes with the same array of faces.

If the meshes vert, edge, or face ids are arranged different, this could be what is causing the problem.
Maybe something changed after the mesh was duplicated.

Thanks for the reply. That is the process I used. I tried to make that known in the screen shot. the top left pic is the back mesh selected with the key I’m wanting to transfer. The top right pic is the front mesh shift selected, and the drop down showing my choice of transfer shape key. The bottom pic is the key transferred and the distorted mesh as the result. These meshes have the exact same poly face count with a vertex count of 17850. everything that I have read and saw online shows that you can take meshs with exact topologies but that are shaped differently and successfully transfer a shape key. An example of this is the you tube video entitled Blender 2.5 shape key transfer. But still that should not be the case here. these meshes are identical in shape as well. Please let me know if my process explained differs from what you have expressed here. Thanks for your time, looking forward to any help that you or any one else has to offer.

Its hard to tell what the problem may be, without seeing the blend file.

For the meshes, the shape doesnt matter, this can change.
What matters is the face array, the meshes must use the same ids for the verts, edges, and faces.

When you duplicate a mesh, blender keeps the face array the same (I think… Maybe errors can happen).
Though if you remodel the mesh, or do something else that modifies the mesh, the vert, edge, or face id numbers may be in different location.
This picture may help explain: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=80427

Somehow this has probably happend to one of the meshes.

I dont think there is an easy way to solve this.
If you want to use Transfer Shape Key, I think you will probably have to duplicate the mesh again.
Though it may of been the duplication that caused the error, I dunno.

There maybe other ways to do what you are trying todo, whatever that may be.