Deform Engine

Deform Engine is a rigging addon created in Python for the popular 3D modeling & animation software Blender. It is designed to address two key limitations of the software that hold the rigging workflow back. These are armature pose recognition and layered bone deformation.

Pose recognition is the process of dynamically identifying the pose the character rig is in, whether the leg is bent forward for a cannon ball or fully horizontally extended to perform a split. This is achieved by deform engine creating a relative quaternion value from a parent and child bone. This quaternion rotation value is stored as a snapshot and compared to the current updating relative quaternion of the two parent bones as an angle difference.

The angle difference is distilled to a normalized value between 0 and 1 that the rigger can now use to drive corrective shape keys or the influence values of many other constraints find in blenders toolkit. This normalized angle difference is created by a user defined angle threshold. This allows the user to define the steepness of the range the corrective shape key or other constraint will applied based on the comparing pose.