RBF Deformer Tool in Mesh Morpher

Some deformations are faster to direct than to sculpt: drag a handle at the chin and the jaw follows smoothly, pin the temples so they stay put, mirror everything to the other side. That is what the RBF (Radial Basis Function) Deformer in Mesh Morpher does - handle-based deformation with production-grade control, directly in Unreal Engine.

How it works

You place control points on the mesh. Moving, rotating or scaling a control point deforms the surrounding surface, with the falloff shaped by the RBF kernel you choose. A handful of handles can pose a face, resize features or rough out a body variant in seconds - and because it runs in-engine, you see the result on the real asset immediately.

What sets this implementation apart

• A wide kernel library: TPS, Gaussian, Multiquadric, Wendland C0-C6, Wu C2/C4 and more - each with a different falloff character, from buttery-smooth global blends to tight local influence.
• Dedicated solvers for global kernels and for compact-support/local kernels, so large and small edits both stay fast.
• Automatic shape parameter estimation based on handle spacing - sensible falloffs out of the box, without manually tuning epsilon values.
• Symmetric control points - edit one side of a face, get both.
• Full transforms per handle: location, rotation and scale, not just translation.
• Savable setups: store a control point rig to a dedicated asset and reuse it across meshes and sessions.

See it in action

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

▶ Watch the video on YouTube

Choosing a kernel

As a starting point: use a global kernel (TPS, Gaussian, Multiquadric) when a few handles should influence the whole region smoothly - facial proportions, body reshaping. Use a compact-support kernel (Wendland, Wu) when edits must stay local - tweaking a nostril without moving the cheek. The automatic shape estimation adapts to your handle spacing either way, so experimenting is cheap.

Tips

• Pin what should not move. Control points with zero displacement act as anchors - surround the edit region to contain the deformation.
• Save the rig. A control point setup saved as an asset becomes a reusable morphing rig for every character that shares the topology.
• Bake to morph targets. RBF edits can become Mesh Morpher Classic morph targets, entering the same pipeline as sculpted shapes.

Related tools

The RBF Deformer is available in Classic, and the same solver family powers the GPU deformers in Mesh Morpher Graph - alongside Lattice, Cage (MVC) and Elastic Conformer. RBF solving is also the machinery behind Pose Drivers. Full reference: RBF Deformer documentation.