Hey!
A someone on my team just mentioned that they want to use morph deformers instead of blendshapes. I can’t find many resources online and I am a bit afraid of it breaking rigs or having unforseen consequences.
Does anyone of you have experience with it?
( Maya Docs on the deformer: Help )
Hey chris! Morphers are blendshapes! It’s just the name nomenclature.
Blendshapes (Maya), Morphers (3DSMax), Shape Keys (Blender)
I hope that helps!
I didn’t know they added it until now, checked the documentation page but it didn’t make any sense. What are the differences?
I’ve only briefly looked at them. But it’s more like when you’re using a live, always-on blendshape to morph to an entire mesh. This replaces that technique, I guess.
But it’s more than that because it has some functionality to map to other topology. Which is how they pin the hair to the face and hair in the link and it still animates relatively. For that functionality, it’s less like a blendshape, and closer to a wrap deformer, or a barycentric interpolation kind of pinning. (I’m guessing that is what their algorithm likely is.)
It’s GPU accelerated. And has some different absolute, relative, and surface modes.
It sounds like you can have partial morphs too. I don’t know if that means you can have painted maps. But I imagine you can do procedural effects using falloffs, which could help with things like zipper lips. Maya 2022 Falloffs Quick Look · Mathias Røyrvik
And without testing, I’m quite certain this would not be appropriate for game export. But neither are live-blendshapes.
And so to answer the original question, this wouldn’t replace blendshapes. It’s something different. If you aren’t working in game export, you could use both of them together. For triggering a long list of shapes, like facial expressions, you’d still use blendshapes.
Omg, you guys are right…they just add stuff without me realizing it don’t they…