How to Make a Cube Twist

Have you ever wondered how to make a cube twist in Blender? You need to use a feature called a Shape Key. I've tried to find a tutorial on Shape Keys before. But I couldn't find any - so I decided to write one. A Shape Key is used to transform one or more vertexes.

Skill:Medium

Here are the steps:

1. Start up Blender.

2. Enter edit mode by pressing tab (on the keyboard) and press 0(on the keypad) to go into camera view.

3. Select the vertexes you want to change.

4. Select the Edit tools.

5. Go into the Shapes Tab.

6. Click the Add Shape Key button two times. Notice that the name of this key is Key 1 - you can change this name to whatever you want I'm going to name this key "twist".

7. Drag the slider to the end.

8. Rotate or move the vertex (or vertexes) you want to change.

9. Exit Edit Mode and Enter Object Mode.

10. Drag the slider and it will repeat your transformation!

Good job! You can make a Shape Keys! Read My next article about Animating Shape Keys.

Warning! you must

exit edit mode and

enter object mode

or else your slider

will not work!

How Morph in an Animation

In the last article I wrote about making shape keys. Now what are you going to do with those!? The entire reason you made those was to animate them!

Skill: Mediam

Here are the steps:

1. Start up Blender.

2. Open your .blend file that has Shape Keys in it.
3. Open an Ipo Curve Editor if you don't know how to, look at my article on animation.

4. On the Ipo Type drop down menu select Shape.
5. Open the Edit Tools Panel.
6. Open the Shapes tab.
7. Select the Shape Key key you want to animate.
8. Drag the slider to the correct value for the Shape Key in frame one.

9. Advance a few frames.
10. Drag the slider to the correct value.
11. Repeat step 9-10 to the end of the animation.






Now you can animate shape keys!!! Try using shape keys in your next animation.