Animator Yuriy Fomin shared a new shape-shifting animation, a follow-up to his previous post featuring a werewolf head transformation. Fomin explained that both effects rely on a combination of skinning and animation, in which individual facial areas are first deformed by joints so that the pose matches the shape of the upcoming blendshape target.
With this second piece, though, Fomin says the pipeline finally fell into place, turning out simpler than the werewolf example. The workflow also changed: blend shapes are now driven by bone orientation through a Weight Driver with Smooth interpolation, again using the SHAPES plugin, resulting in predictable falloff without manual keying on the corrective shapes.
Further plans include bringing the same transformation onto a custom MetaHuman to ensure that speech and the shift into the target form can run simultaneously.
Check out the werewolf transformation showcased by the artist:
