Mesh Morpher and Pose Drivers

Secondary animation - a forearm twist correcting the wrist, a shoulder pad following the clavicle, muscle bulges driven by joint angles - traditionally means authoring Pose Drivers in Maya with Pose Driver Connect. Mesh Morpher builds them directly in Unreal Engine and exports finished Animation Blueprint nodes, so the whole loop stays in-engine.

What a Pose Driver is

A Pose Driver reads the transform of a bone (say, the forearm) and uses an RBF solver to blend corrective poses or morphs as the bone moves. Instead of keyframing corrections into every animation, the correction follows the pose automatically - whatever animation plays.

The workflow in Mesh Morpher

The Pose Driver tools live in the Mesh Morpher Classic Poser:

1. Create an RBF Solver from a selected bone - the driver that will be watched.
2. Set the RBF settings for how poses should blend.
3. Create the poses and their transformations - each target pose paired with the correction it should trigger.
4. Export to a Post Process Animation Blueprint. Mesh Morpher automatically creates the Pose Assets and animation sequences the Pose Driver nodes require - no manual asset assembly.

Both videos walk through the process end to end:

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

Why in-engine authoring changes the iteration loop

Authoring pose drivers externally means guessing how a correction will look under the real animation set, exporting, importing and checking. Authoring them in the engine means the animation that will actually ship is your preview: adjust a pose, scrub Sequencer, adjust again. For teams without a Maya seat, it also removes the last dependency from the corrective workflow.

Tips

• Author the corrective shapes first. Sculpt the corrections as morph targets - in-engine with the sculpt tools, or generated via the Poser correctives workflow.
• Start with few poses. Two or three well-placed poses per driver blend more predictably than a dense set; add more only where interpolation visibly fails.
• Use the post-process blueprint slot. Exported drivers go into the mesh post-process Animation Blueprint, so they apply under every gameplay animation automatically.
• Measure the result. The Ruler tracks how your corrections move specific points of interest across an animation.

Related workflows

Pose Drivers pair naturally with Delta Mush corrections - one drives corrections from bone poses at runtime, the other bakes corrections across animation sequences. For full-body proportion changes rather than pose corrections, see morphing MetaHumans and skeletons dynamically.