(06-04-2024, 08:44 AM)josemendez Wrote: Nope, that's not how blend shapes work at all. They work on the base mesh, prior to any skinning or skeletal deformation.
Imagine you make a blend shape for a facial expression. If you were to apply blend shapes on the skinned mesh (after skeletal animation), rotating the neck to the left then applying the blend shape would make the face morph into the original position facial expression, looking forward: it would "override" animation.
Same happens with softbody deformation. If you were to apply blend shapes after softbody simulation, the mesh would completely ignore the deformation due to the softbody and morph into the original, rigid blend shape.
So blend shapes must be applied *before* both skeletal animation and softbody simulation, which in the case of a softbody means recalculating the rest shape as modified by the blend shape.
You misunderstood what I meant. I'm 99.9% confident that I understand how blendshapes work, as someone who has implemented this feature from scratch in a custom engine. Unless Unity's blendshapes are very abnormal, but I don't believe it's the case.
When I said blendshapes work on skinned mesh, I were not trying to say them work on mesh after deformation. I know blendshapes work on the rest shape. I meant that blendshape work on the mesh that is skinned (has vertices weights painted), not the softbody mesh. By "softbody mesh" I mean the thing is simulated, which is just a bunch of particles with constraints between them.
Shape-matching constraints work on the softbody mesh, so it should not be affected by blendshapes.