For decades, the phrase "morph target animation" conjured a specific set of images for 3D artists: bloated file sizes, linear interpolation, rigid facial expressions, and the dreaded "joint collapse" in a character's elbow. While skeletal (rigid) skinning has dominated real-time rendering—particularly in gaming—morph target animation has often been relegated to pre-rendered cinematics or subtle facial blendshapes.
Why not just use bones for everything?
Practical tip: provide animators with both macro (high-level) controls and access to raw sliders; macro controls call multiple underlying blendshapes with mapped weights for expressive leverage. morph target animation new
Morph target animation—also known as blend shapes shape keys Morph Target Animation is New Again: How Real-Time