Chapter 6. Animating with Deformers

As you learned in Chapter 1, objects in a Maya scene have both a transform node and a shape node. The transform node contains data concerning where the object is in a scene, its orientation, and its scale. The shape node contains data about the form of the object. If you want to animate an object moving around in a scene, usually you'll keyframe the translation, rotation, and scale of the transform node. If you want to animate the shape of an object, such as the facial expressions of a character, you want to use a deformer, which is a type of animation control applied to the shape node of an object.

Deformers are extremely versatile, and they can be used for both modeling and animation and as part of an animation ...

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