Deformers

What are blend shapes?

Blend shape deformers let you change the shape of one object into the shapes of other objects.

Blend shape deformers let you to deform a surface into the shapes of other surfaces. You can blend shapes with the same or a number of vertices (or CVs). In character setup, a typical use of a blend shape deformer is to set up poses for facial animation.

Unlike other deformers, the blend shape deformer has an editor that lets you control all the blend shape deformers in your scene. You can use the editor to control the influence of the targets of each blend shape deformer, create new blend shape deformers, set keys, and so on.

Note Other software packages use the terms “morph,” “morphing,” and “shape interp” to refer to what Maya provides with blend shape deformers.

When creating a blend shape deformer, you identify one or more objects whose shapes you want to use to deform the shape of some other object. Objects whose shapes you want to use to deform the shape of another object are called target objects, and the object being deformed is called the base object.