How To Use Blendshapes and UVs in Godot 4 To Customize 3D Objects

a screen capture of my current game project, with one of the custom fishes made with this technique

I’ve been working with Godot 4 for the past few months. I worked with the Unity game engine for over 10 years before I switched to Godot for… reasons.

In general I’ve been finding Godot really pleasant to work with for 3D games, but there are some things that are a little trickier to find resources for, especially since most of the content around Godot is focused on 2D games.

Two of the more recent issues I ran into were figuring out how to interact with some 3D model properties in code at runtime: Blendshapes and UV coordinates.

The documentation covers how to set Blendshape values and also how to access the UV coordinates, but when doing both at the same time I ran into some errors I wasn’t initially sure how to resolve.

So this is my contribution back to the community, in the hopes I can help out anyone else who has these questions.

one example of mesh alterations made with Blendshapes

What are Blendshapes?

Let’s talk briefly about Blendshapes, and how you might use them. These also go by other names, such as Shape Keys, or Morph Targets. They are a way to define an alteration…