Blend shapes

Atoms supports blend shapes deformation. To use blend shapes during the simulation, the blend shapes targets must be exported using the export mesh tool. The mesh exporter tool writes the blend shape data of each target (P, N, id and name) inside the mesh file. The variation builder automatically exports this data.

When you load a mesh inside the variation manager, Atoms also loads all the blend shape targets if they exist.

Double metadata named following the given naming convention must be used to control the weight of each blend shape: (AGENT TYPE NAME)_(MESH_NAME)_(TARGET_ID)

For instance, if you added three blend shapes to the atoms robot head mesh ("robot1_head"), you would control them with the following double metadata: "atomsRobot_robot1_head_0","atomsRobot_robot1_head_1", "atomsRobot_robot1_head_2". Please remember that the geometry name is not the mesh file name, but the name used inside the Variation manager.

You can add these metadata using the "addMetadata" module, or you can animate the blend shapes with the blendShapeAnim module, please have a look at the tutorial section.