Morph Target Animation New May 2026

Old hardware could only blend positions. Modern engines blend normals & tangents too — but at a high cost.

New method:

This cuts bandwidth by ~50% with no visible quality loss.

The technology is meaningless if artists can't control it. The new generation of morph tools has finally moved beyond "sliders in a list." morph target animation new

Morph target animation (also called blend shapes or shape interpolation) has long been a staple for facial animation, corrective shapes, and detailed deformations. However, traditional implementations suffer from high memory usage, vertex shader bandwidth limits, and poor scalability for many simultaneous targets.

Recent advances have made morph targets practical for complex real-time scenarios (games, VR, digital humans). Here's what's new.

One of the biggest issues with animating long pieces using bones is volume loss. When you bend a tube using bones, the mesh often collapses on the inner curve. Old hardware could only blend positions

Morph targets are the superior solution here. You can sculpt a "Corrective Blend Shape" that activates only when the bone bends past a certain angle, pushing the vertices outward to maintain the tube's thickness.

Delta Mush is a deformer that removes skinning artifacts by smoothing the deformation and adding back fine detail. Previously, this was a pre-bake or simulation-time operation. New tools allow artists to "bake Delta Mush to morph targets"—essentially generating a corrective morph for every frame of an animation clip. The resulting data can be compressed and played back as a sequence of morphs, giving skeletal deformation the quality of a sculpted frame-by-frame animation.

If you want to implement next-gen morph targeting in your project, here is a pragmatic checklist: This cuts bandwidth by ~50% with no visible quality loss

The modern approach dismantles these bottlenecks through three revolutionary shifts: