You can add deformation effects to your characters and objects to enhance their animations. Deformers are tools that let you transform or animate objects in ways that simple manipulation and keyframes cannot. Deformers have two main applications: to model surfaces or to add extra shape animations to an object.
You can use deformers as modeling tools. You can create a deformer, for example a sculpt deformer tool, tweak the model’s shape with it, and then delete the history from your object when the deformer is no longer needed. When you delete the object’s history, you delete the deformer and retain the object’s deformed shape.
You can use deformers as animation tools. You can create a deformer, tweak the target object with the deformer, and then key the deformer’s attributes over time to produce an animation. For example, you can create a blend shape deformer for a model of a face. Then over time, you can manipulate and key the sliders for the deformer in the Blend Shape editor to create an animation.
