Morph Target Animation New

Beyond Bones: A Deep Dive into Morph Target Animation

When we think of 3D animation, the first image that usually comes to mind is a skeleton. We picture a rigged mesh with bones, joints, and inverse kinematics—a digital puppet.

1. Blinn, J. F. (1982). A simulation of wrinkled surfaces. Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 149-156.
2. Parke, F. I. (1982). A parametric model for human facial animation. Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 157-163.
3. Luo, P., & Ma, W. (2017). Deep learning-based methods for morph target animation. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Animation, 1-9.

3. Technical Implementation

A. The Data Structure

For a long piece (e.g., a cat's tail), you do not want to store a morph target for every single frame of an animation. That would be memory prohibitive. morph target animation new

Skeletal Animation (Rigging):

Secondary Deformation: Soft body physics, breathing idle animations, or "cartoon squash and stretch" are nearly impossible to do cleanly with rigs alone. Morph targets are perfect for these stylized or corrective shapes. Beyond Bones: A Deep Dive into Morph Target