Drive shapekey based on activating a pose?

Question

I have a character with a rig that involves an armature with a pose library, and various shapekeys made from backed simulations. I want to make it so that when I load a specific pose, it also turns sets the influence of the associated shapekey to 1.

It seems that either I need to run a script that takes the name of the pose and shapekey and loads them, or I need a way to have it automatically activate the shape key when the pose is activated.

Are either of these options possible? Is there a better way?

Answer 1

You could try driving the shapekey and an action constraint from the same property or controller. Or control the action constraint's influence directly and have the influence drive the shapekey. This will require explicitly loading the pose though, you won't activate anything just freely posing the rig close to a given pose.

It is also possible to add a set of marker bones indicating the pose and then create drivers using 'Rotation Difference' variables between the marker bones an the actual bones and make it so the dirver is fully activated when the rotational difference is equal to zero. This may be vary complex to setup and tune for complex poses though, but does give the advantage of allowing free posing of the rig.