Custom shape keys

Want to give a custom shape to your humans and save it to reuse later? For example, want to add a slider for elf ears? This guide shows how to make your sliders show up in one of these places:

• Body sliders
• Face sliders
• Face presets
• 1-click expressions
• Hidden sliders (for scripts)

1) How to make a shape key

Select the body object, and go to the "Shape Keys" section of the "Object Data" tab.

1. Add shape key: Press this button to add a new shape key
2. Rename shape key: Give the shape key a clear and descriptive name. This is the name that will show up as the slider name in HG
3. Value: Set the value of the slider to 1.0, otherwise you will not see your edits..
4. Edit mode toggle: If you want to edit your shape key while still seeing the effect of all the other keys, enable this button. (For example the male shape is also a shape key on top of a female base mesh. If you don't enable this, you will see the female base mesh while editing your shape key, which might not be what you want)

Now perform your edits. You can use edit mode, proportional editing, or sculpting. Here we use sculpting with symmetry turned on.

For a more complete view on how shape keys work on how to create them, Alex Lashko (the co-creator of Human Generator) has made the following video tutorial:

2) Go to the "Custom Content" tab

The switch is located at the top of the Human Generator interface. NOTE: Make sure the human who's shape key you want to save is the active object.

You should see the custom shape key you created in the list of "Save to library". Press Save (2) next to the shape key you want to save.

3) Choose a category

First you can choose what type of key this is in the dropdown (1). This is what the categories mean:

• Body Proportions: Keys saved here will show as sliders in the "Body" tab of Human Generator.
• Face Proportions: Keys saved in this category will show up in the "Face" tab of Human Generator as sliders.
• Face presets: These will also show as sliders in the "Face" tab, but are not meant to be used directly by users. If you're making a shape key that will only be used as part of a starting human, save it here.
• Expressions: These will show up as 1-click expression items in the "Expressions" tab.
• Special: These won't show up anywhere. For example the height system of HG uses special keys. These keys are only accessible using the Python API.

For each of these types, you can choose a subcategory. For example for body proportions you can choose "Main" (they show up at the top), "Muscles", "Torso", etc. You can also create a new category by switching to "Create new" (2) and giving a custom name.

4) Choose a name

This name will show up as the slider name and will be used as filename. Then press Save.

5) Your shape key is now saved!

It will be available on any new human you create.

indices.npy
[[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, etc.]
relative_coordinates.npy
[0.0006380937993526459, 0.007638104259967804, -0.005018115043640137, 0.0010991264134645462, etc]