Deformation and skinning for games ?

[PEN]

Really no deformers will work as they are not in the game. You need to do just straight skinning. That being said if the engine that you are working with has had a some sort of deformer added to it then it could support it if the exporter knows what to do with it.

Consider that a game engine is not Maya, Max or XSI and doesn't have the tools that are in them. Deformers in Max are different then in Maya and the same for XSI so the engine wouldn't know what to do with it. So usualy the only thing an engine does do is the basics like linier skin weighting which all the softwares use.

[Poroksy]

As far as I know, two major method of deformation exist in game engines, one is skeleton deformation, the other is morph target. If you use the morph target, you can definitely put all kinds of deformers on the character in your software, and then bake them to vertex data frame by frame. It's up to the game designer or technical director to decide which method to use, having vextex data for each frame would have better result, but it takes up more memory.

[PEN]

You are right that morph data could be used but morph data like that is to expensive and I can't see it being used. Facial work will use it from time to time but it is always limited and the main method will be bones.

[stewartjones]

Yeah, I've found that it's normally joints all the way with a couple of morphs/blendshapes here and there.

Using driven joint to siulate sliding or keeping volume etc is a-ok however, so that can help keep the deformations looking better for sure.

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