Morph target animation

In this example from the open source project Sintel, four facial expressions have been defined as deformations of the face geometry. The mouth is then animated by morphing between these deformations. Dozens of similar controllers are used to animate the rest of the face.
An arbitrary object deformed by morphing between defined vertex positions.

Morph target animation, per-vertex animation, shape interpolation, shape keys, or blend shapes[1] is a method of 3D computer animation used together with techniques such as skeletal animation. In a morph target animation, a "deformed" version of a mesh is stored as a series of vertex positions. In each key frame of an animation, the vertices are then interpolated between these stored positions.

  1. ^ Liu, Chen (2006). "An Analysis of the Current and Future State of 3D Facial Animation Techniques and Systems" (PDF). pp. 12–14. Retrieved January 30, 2011.