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I used 'FaceIt' to create some shape keys that also control eye movement. Since my eyes are procedural, I used dummy spheres for the eyes to bind the rig. The dummy eyes move fine with the shape keys, but I'm stuck on how to create a driver in my procedural eye based on the shape key. Is it even possible?

Note I'm able to control the procedural eye from the rig just fine with a driver that vector maps the rig x and z position to the eye rotation. Now I just need it to work with the shape keys. I tried mapping the dummy sphere x and z rotation to the procedural eye rotation like I did with the rig. It works fine when rotating the dummy spheres in object mode, but not when the dummy sphere rotates due to the shape key. The procedural eyes do not move with the rotation of the dummy sphere when using the shape keys.

Thanks for any insight or help.

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You can drive almost anything you want (including a shader's value node) from almost anything you want (including a shapekey's current value):

enter image description here

Here, I'm using the shapekey's value to drive a value node which eventually makes it into the rotation of a mapping node, which rotates the object coordinates of my simple eye.

I simply right clicked on the shapekey value, "copy as new driver", right clicked in my value node's field, "paste as new driver." You can see I'm not doing anything fancy with that driver, just using nodes to map it and make sure it goes where it needs to go.

Exactly what you'd need to do with your shapekey value is not clear, because we don't know what your procedural eye texture is, and we don't know what your shapekey is.

I have to say additionally that this is probably not a good way to do things. I would much rather parent an object-coordinate-procedural eye to an eye bone that tracks vertices on the mesh, or drive the shapekey from the eye rather than driving the eye from shapekey. But, again, I don't know what you're doing, it might be something weird, so maybe this is the exception.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks Nathan, I'll give that a try. I may still end up going the bone route, but since the shape keys were generated by the FaceIt application (52 standard face expressions), I want to figure out a way to keep my procedural eye instead of the normal eye mesh. $\endgroup$
    – Bruce
    Commented May 18, 2022 at 21:55

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