*FREE* Throb Effect Proof of Concept (Blender File Included!) (Patreon)

This is a proof of concept Blender project I did where it was necessary that the Shape Keys were activated past a certain threshold, and de-activated past another threshold. It took me a while of playing with it, but I finally got a working method for it, and I want to share it!

The method just uses the location of a single Bone to drive Shape Keys from values 0-1. Since there are separate activation thresholds, the expression ( (location * y) -x ) is used, where X is the bone distance between activation thresholds, and y is the distance that the bone must travel before activation. Additionally, the Graph inside the Drivers editor is set to be a parabola as opposed to a linear set, which de-activates shape keys after a set threshold. The X-value of the second point on the graph may need to be adjusted based on the scale of your model.