Studio and Graph

Introduction

Mesh Morpher builds and reshapes meshes with a node graph. You place nodes, wire them together, and each one does a single job: load a file, decimate, unwrap, sculpt, bake, write an FBX. The graph ...

Mesh Morpher builds and reshapes meshes with a node graph. You place nodes, wire them together, and each one does a single job: load a file, decimate, unwrap, sculpt, bake, write an FBX. The graph is the recipe, so the same sequence runs again tomorrow on a different asset without you repeating a single click.

This section documents the node library, node by node. There are over 340 of them across 41 categories, and every page here describes the pins, the settings and what the node actually does with them.

It also documents the application around them: Fundamentals for the window, the panels and the graph editor, The Viewport for the two preview panes, Sculpt Tools for the brushes, and Settings for every preference the app keeps.

Two products, one node library

They are the same tool wearing two coats. The node library, the graph editor, the sculpt brushes, the Python stage and the .mmgraph file format are shared, so a graph built in one opens in the other. That is why one reference covers both.

Mesh Morpher Classic is a separate product: the original morph-target toolkit for Unreal Engine, with its own runtime module. It is not a node graph and it is not documented in this section.

What a graph is, and what it is not

A node is one operation. It has input pins on the left, output pins on the right, and a settings list you edit in the Details panel. Wires carry meshes, weight maps, textures, transforms, landmarks, deltas and plain numbers between them.

What surprises people coming from other node editors is that a graph is not a timeline and nothing runs continuously. There are two kinds of node and it is worth knowing which you are looking at:

Three more habits are worth forming early:

• Select a node to look at it. The viewport shows the output of whatever node is selected, so clicking your way down the chain is how you find the step that went wrong.
• Every node carries its own documentation. The book icon on a node opens View node documentation without leaving the app. These pages are the same material, indexed and cross-linked.
• Undo covers the whole graph. Wiring, node settings, sculpt strokes and paint are all one transactional history.

Finding your way around

The sidebar lists every category. If you know what you want to do but not which node does it, start here.

What you need to run it

Mesh Morpher checks your graphics device on startup and tells you plainly if something will hold it back - an integrated card sharing system memory, a driver on the known-problem list, or a driver old enough to have shader-compilation bugs. Sculpting and the GPU deformers need real graphics hardware; the rest of the library does not.

Next

Studio and Graph

Getting Started

Studio is a standalone Windows application. Nothing else has to be installed first.

Install and activate

The window

Five panels, arranged however you like. Window switches them; drag a tab to redock it.

Above them sit four menus - File, Edit, Window and Help - and the toolbar's New, Open, Save and Settings buttons.

Build your first graph

This one needs no files at all: Primitive arrives already carrying a mesh, so there is something to look at from the first click.

1. 1

   Start a new graph

   File > New Graph, or pick New empty graph in the welcome dialog.

2. 2

   Add a Primitive node

   Right-click anywhere on the canvas. The Add Node menu opens with the search box already focused - type primitive, then click Primitive.

   Select it and pick a shape in Details. The viewport fills in immediately, because Primitive is a reactive node: there is no button to press.

3. 3

   Wire a Sculpt Mesh node onto it

   Drag from Primitive's Mesh output pin and let go over empty canvas. The same menu opens, now filtered to Compatible with Mesh - so only nodes that can actually accept a mesh are offered. Choose Sculpt Mesh and it is placed and wired in one gesture.

4. 4

   Sculpt

   Select the Sculpt Mesh node, pick a brush from the tool column, and pull the geometry around in the viewport. Press Accept when you are happy - that is what commits the strokes to the node's output.

5. 5

   Write it out

   Drag from Sculpt Mesh's output, add Write FBX, then press its action button in Details and choose a destination. Export nodes never fire on their own - a graph should not write files while you are still editing it.

Three things that save an afternoon

Start from an example instead

The welcome dialog's Start from an example opens a set of complete, wired graphs that each solve one real job. Every one carries a note across the canvas telling you which button to press next, in order.

Saving and reopening

Graphs are .mmgraph files. File > Save writes one, File > Open reads one back, and File > Recent Files reopens the last few. The welcome dialog lists the same recents, so the graph you were working on yesterday is one click from launch.

Where to go next

Studio and Graph

Fundamentals

The reference for the application itself: its window, its panels, the graph editor, what travels on a wire, and how your work is saved.

This is the reference for the application itself - the window, its panels, the graph canvas, and the files it reads and writes - not for any individual node. Node behaviour is documented node by node elsewhere; these pages explain the shell everything runs inside, once, so the node pages do not have to repeat it. For a fast walkthrough instead of a reference, see Getting Started.

• The Window - the menu bar, the main toolbar, the document tab strip, and the Welcome screen.
• Panels - the six dockable panels, what each one shows, and how docking and layout behave.
• Working in the Graph - navigating the canvas, the Add Node menu, comment boxes, search, the minimap, and subgraphs.
• Nodes and Wires - reading a node card, the out-of-date rule, and the rules that govern wiring.
• Pins and Data Types - what a pin is, and the full set of data types that travel across wires.
• Files, Autosave and Recovery - the .mmgraph format, saving, autosave, crash recovery, and node presets.

Studio and Graph › Fundamentals

The Window

The menu bar, the toolbar, the document tabs and the welcome screen, entry by entry.

The menu bar sits at the very top of the window, above the main toolbar and the document tab strip. Four pull-down menus, in this order: File (tooltip: "File operations"), Edit (tooltip: "Edit operations"), Window (tooltip: "Switch panels") and Help (tooltip: "Help and about").

File menu

Three groups, in this order: Graph, Node Sharing, Application.

Opening a file that is already open in another document tab does not open a second copy - it focuses the existing tab and shows the toast Already open: {filename}. Opening one of the shipped example graphs, from anywhere including Open... or Recent Files, never opens the shipped file in place - see the Welcome screen section below.

Recent Files submenu

Recent Files lists up to five entries, newest first. Each row's label is the file's plain filename; its tooltip is the full absolute path. Clicking a row opens that file. If the file no longer exists, the app removes it from the list and shows the toast File no longer exists: {full path} - the list prunes itself rather than leaving dead entries behind. A file is added to the list both when it is opened and when it is saved, and reopening a file already in the list moves it to the top instead of duplicating it. When the list is empty, it shows a single, permanently disabled entry: No recent files.

This is the same list that fills the Welcome screen's Recent files column (see below).

Edit menu

Four groups: Selection, Clipboard, Organize, Application. Shortcuts are rebindable in Settings; the defaults are listed below.

Window menu

One group, Panels. All five entries are check-box toggles whose tick reflects whether that panel's tab is currently open. None of them has a tooltip.

Target Viewport is deliberately absent from this menu. It manages itself and cannot be closed - see Panels. The Window menu is the only in-app way to reopen a panel you closed, aside from three gestures that auto-foreground one: activating a tool foregrounds Details, clicking a document tab foregrounds Graph, and a viewport capture foregrounds Viewport.

Help menu

Eight entries, no section headings.

Main toolbar

A slim toolbar directly under the menu bar, in two sections separated by a divider. No button is ever disabled, and none has a keyboard shortcut.

Document tab strip

A separate row, below the toolbar, listing open .mmgraph documents - not panels.

• The tab label is the document's display name, bold when active. An asterisk * is appended while the document has unsaved changes.
• The active tab gets a thin accent-coloured bar underneath it.
• Clicking a tab foregrounds the Graph panel (reopening it if it is closed), then switches documents.
• The x close button closes that document. Tooltip: "Close this graph"
• The + button, at the trailing end of the strip, opens a new untitled document. Tooltip: "Open a new graph in a tab"

A new tab's name is decided in this priority order: an explicit title if one was given, otherwise the graph's stored display name (from the .mmgraph file), otherwise the file's base name, otherwise Untitled-N, where N increases by one for each new untitled tab in the session.

Closing the last document does not leave you with nothing - a fresh untitled document is created automatically.

Switching tabs while a tool has unbaked edits prompts you first:

You have unsaved tool edits on the current node.

Yes - accept and bake the changes before switching.
No  - discard the changes and switch.
Cancel - stay on this tab.

A similarly shaped prompt appears when closing a document or the app instead - see Files, Autosave and Recovery.

Welcome screen

The Welcome screen opens automatically at startup, unless you have ticked Don't show this again, and it never appears when the app was launched by double-clicking a .mmgraph file. It waits behind any startup modal (such as a graphics-device warning) before appearing. Reopen it any time with Help > Welcome.

It has two columns.

Start from an example (left column) lists one scrollable button per shipped example, its title in bold and its description underneath. Every button carries the same tooltip:

"Copies the shipped example into your Starters folder and opens the copy. The original in the app's Resources folder is never touched, and clicking again gives you another fresh copy rather than reusing the one you have been working in."

Below the list, a Browse the example files... button is visible only when the shipped .mmgraph files are actually on disk. It is the only button in the dialog that does not close it; its tooltip: "Shows the folder holding the example graphs as ordinary .mmgraph files, so they can be read, copied or shared. It is part of the installation, so treat it as read-only - open an example from the list above to get an editable copy."

Recent files (right column) mirrors the same list as File > Recent Files. When it is empty, it reads "Nothing yet. Graphs you open or save show up here." Otherwise it lists one button per recent file - filename in bold, folder underneath, full path in the tooltip - and clicking one goes through the same self-healing path as the menu entry. A bottom button, Open other graph... (tooltip: "Browse for a .mmgraph file."), closes the dialog and opens the normal Open dialog instead.

The footer holds three controls:

Studio and Graph › Fundamentals

Panels

What each of the six panels shows, how docking and layout behave, and how to get a closed panel back.

The six panels

All six panels live under one workspace category, Panels, and none of them can be turned into a floating sidebar drawer - they can only be docked, tabbed together, or torn off into a floating window.

Details

With nothing selected, Details reads:

Select a node to edit its properties

With exactly one comment box selected, it becomes a Comment Box editor: Text (multi-line), Color (with a Pick... button), Position (X/Y), Size (W/H), and a Delete Comment button.

A multi-selection clears the panel. With a single node selected, Details adds an Actions section of clickable node actions - this is where action nodes run, see the Introduction - plus a per-node timing readout once the node has run.

A property that is currently driven by a connected pin is locked, with this tooltip:

Driven by the "{0}" pin - disconnect it to edit this value.

Scene

Columns: a visibility check box, Object (the object's name plus a role line), and an Isolate button. The header strip reads {N} object(s) and carries a Show All button.

Roles: Edit target, Target pane, Reference (view only), Animation (view only), Extra (view only).

When the list is empty:

No objects in the preview.

The preview shows the mesh pins of the node selected in the graph. Select a node that carries a mesh to populate this list.

When it is not empty, a footer reads:

Rows come from the selected graph node's mesh pins, so this list changes with the graph selection. Tools edit the "Edit target" row only.

Other exact strings:

Visibility and isolate state reset every time the active document tab changes - they belong to the document, not to the app as a whole.

Docking

The panel area is a real dock area: panels can be resized, reordered, docked anywhere, tabbed together, and torn off into floating windows, in the packaged app and inside the editor alike.

Default arrangement: left column is Viewport, with Target Viewport as a closed second stack beside it; right column is Graph on top (70%) over a stack of Details / Agentic / Scene below (30%), with Details foregrounded.

Layout is remembered. The dock layout is written to MMAppLayout.json and flushed on window close, window deactivate (alt-tab) and window move. A saved layout that fails to parse falls back to the built-in default. Window position, size and maximised state are remembered too, though not while the window is minimised, and a saved size below 320x240 is rejected on the next launch. When Mesh Morpher is hosted inside the Unreal Editor, window geometry is not persisted.

Closing a panel does not destroy its state. Every panel wraps an existing widget, so closing its tab destroys only the tab shell - the panel and everything in it survives, and reopening it shows it exactly as you left it. Reopen a closed panel from the Window menu. Nothing reopens a closed panel on a passive event such as selecting a node - only three explicit gestures do: activating a tool foregrounds Details, clicking a document tab foregrounds Graph, and a viewport capture foregrounds Viewport. Floating panel windows are destroyed only on a real app or tab close, never on alt-tab.

Target Viewport manages itself. It opens by itself whenever the selected node has a "Secondary" preview mesh input pin - connected or not - or explicitly asks for it, and it removes itself when the selection changes to a node that does not. It starts empty until something is wired in, on purpose, so it does not pop open and shut while you make the connection. It has no close button, cannot be closed by middle-click, the tab-well menu or Ctrl+W, and does not appear in the Window menu at all.

Studio and Graph › Fundamentals

Working in the Graph

Moving around the canvas, adding nodes, commenting, searching, and collapsing work into subgraphs.

Canvas navigation

Zoom ladder: the wheel steps through a fixed set of levels rather than a smooth range: 0.10, 0.15, 0.25, 0.375, 0.50, 0.625, 0.75, 0.825, 0.875, 0.925, 0.95, 0.975, 1.00, 1.125, 1.25, 1.50, 1.75, 2.00.

Framing never magnifies past 1:1. Pressing F snaps its target zoom down to the nearest level on that same ladder and caps it at 1.00, so framing a small selection never zooms in past actual size. Comments are only included in the frame when you frame the whole graph, not when you frame a selection.

The Add Node menu

Right-click empty canvas, or drop a wire onto empty canvas, to open it. Its header reads Add Node normally, or Compatible with {0} when it was opened by dropping a wire, where {0} is the pin category you dragged from (one of struct, float, int, bool, object, string, name, text, enum, byte, real, double, int64, vector3, wildcard, texture2d or generate_settings).

How search matches: typing in the search field filters live. A node matches if your text appears, case-insensitively, in its displayed title, its short name, its raw class name, its category path (so typing a category name surfaces everything under it - see the category map in the Introduction), or its tooltip. An installed node preset (see Files, Autosave and Recovery) matches on its title, author, category or description instead.

Below the search field: an Add Comment entry; an Insert Simulation Template submenu of ready-made cloth, garment and flesh setups, shown only when simulation nodes are enabled for this install and you did not open the menu by dropping a wire; an Installed Nodes submenu listing every node preset installed on this machine, shown only when at least one is installed (and never offered in wire-drop mode, because a preset's pin surface is not known without placing it); and finally the full node catalogue, a nested tree built from each node's category path, sorted alphabetically, with every category collapsible.

Compatible-with filtering: when you drag a wire out and drop it on empty canvas, only nodes that have at least one pin of the opposite direction whose category is compatible with the pin you dragged from are listed - including the schema's scalar-override coercion exception, and, for struct pins, only nodes whose pin names the same struct type. The picker never offers a node the connection would then refuse, and never refuses one the connection would have accepted.

Auto-wiring: picking a node this way wires it in the same gesture. The graph tries an exact struct-shape match first - so dragging from a Mesh pin prefers offering a Mesh pin over a Selection pin on the new node - then falls back to a category-only match.

Comment boxes

Create one with C, Edit > Add Comment, the Add Node menu's Add Comment entry, or a node's right-click Add Comment Around Selection (see Nodes and Wires). A new box is titled Comment, coloured from the theme's info colour, and sized at least 60x40 free-standing (80x80 once you start resizing it).

Double-click the title bar to rename it in place. Drag anywhere on the body to move the box - this also moves every node it encloses. Drag an edge or corner to resize it. Right-clicking a comment does nothing special - the click falls through to the canvas, so pan and Add Node still work; text, colour, position, size and a Delete Comment button all live in the Details panel instead.

Comments live only at the top level of a graph - they are not drawn inside a subgraph card.

Find panel

Open it with Ctrl+F. It floats over the top-right of the canvas, with a field hinting Find node by title, class or comment; your previous query is pre-selected when you reopen it.

Press Enter in the field to jump to the best hit (not whatever the list happens to have selected); press Down to move focus into the results list instead. Esc closes the panel from the field, the list or the canvas. Each result row shows the node's title with its class name underneath, plus (in subgraph) when the node lives inside a collapsed card. The status line reads No matching nodes, or {0} of {1} nodes, and the list is capped at 50 results.

Clicking or entering a result selects that node, steps into any subgraph cards needed to reach it, and frames it - the panel stays open afterwards so you can try the next hit. Typing in the field never affects the canvas itself, so searching for a node named "Cone" cannot accidentally create a comment box.

Minimap

Bottom-right corner of the canvas, with a toggle button underneath labelled Hide Map or Show Map depending on its state. Tooltip: "Show or hide the graph overview map. Remembered between sessions." It is visible by default, and the setting is remembered between sessions.

It draws every node and comment as a small box (never smaller than 2 px), the selected node outlined, and a rectangle showing the current view. Click or drag on the map to jump the canvas there; right-click, middle-click and the wheel are swallowed so they never reach the canvas underneath, and a double-click is routed to the same jump rather than being able to split a wire beneath the map. The toggle button never takes keyboard focus, so clicking it does not steal focus from the canvas.

Copy, paste and duplicate

Ctrl+C or Edit > Copy copies the selection to the OS clipboard in an internal format, carrying every selected node's properties and pin bytes, the wires between them, and any selected comments. Copying a collapsed subgraph card copies its contents recursively. Only wires whose both ends are inside the selection are copied, and a selection larger than 512 MB is refused silently (logged, not shown).

Paste accepts either that internal format or a shared text envelope (from Copy as Shareable Text - see Nodes and Wires); if the clipboard holds a shared envelope, pasting opens the Import Node Preset dialog instead of placing nodes directly. A clipboard the app does not recognise shows the toast Paste failed / The clipboard does not contain a MeshMorpher node selection or a shared node's text.

Ctrl+D or Edit > Duplicate copies the selection and pastes it at the view centre, offset by (40, 40) - duplicates appear in the middle of the view rather than beside the original.

Subgraphs

Collapsing: select nodes and right-click Collapse to Subgraph (or Collapse {N} Nodes to Subgraph). Wires that cross the boundary become pins on the new card; nothing already inside is rewired, and this is the only way to create a meaningful subgraph card - there is no equivalent entry in the Add Node menu.

Entering: double-click the card, or right-click it and choose Edit Subgraph Contents. Only that card's contents are drawn while you are inside it, your selection is cleared, and the editor restores that subgraph's own last pan and zoom rather than reframing.

Breadcrumb: a small bar at the top-left of the canvas reads GraphName > Card > Card, with every crumb except the current one a clickable button (tooltip: "Go back to this level."). The root crumb uses the graph's display name, or "Graph" if it has none; a card whose node has been deleted shows "Subgraph". The bar is entirely absent at the top level of the graph.

Leaving: press Esc, or click a breadcrumb - either way, the card you just stepped out of is left selected.

Promoted pins: right-click an interior pin's connector and choose Promote to Subgraph Pin to add a connector for it on the card, with or without a wire attached - see Nodes and Wires for the full set of pin-menu entries.

Nodes you create while inside a card - from the picker, a paste, a drop, or an Agentic tool - are adopted into that card even though the tools themselves always add at the top level first; you never lose track of something you just placed.

Copying a card copies its contents the same way. Select All, marquee-select and Frame all operate only on the subgraph scope you are currently viewing, never reaching into cards you have not entered.

Studio and Graph › Fundamentals

Nodes and Wires

The node card and its message strip, the rule that keeps an out-of-date result, and every reason a connection is refused.

The node card

The title bar is coloured by the node's category, may carry a small class icon, and shows the node's title - ellipsised if it is too long to fit, with the full title in its tooltip.

A small round ? button sits in the top-right corner of the title bar. Its tooltip: "View node documentation". Clicking it opens the Node Documentation window (see The Window) on that specific node's page.

The message strip is a coloured footer across the bottom of the card, visible only when the node has a message or a stale output to report. It has four severities: None, Info, Warning and Error, each with its own strip colour from the app's theme. The strip text always ellipsises to one line; the strip itself is the hover target, and its tooltip carries the full message.

The out-of-date rule, in full

When an input to a node changes after that node has already produced a result, Mesh Morpher does not throw the old result away. The message strip shows:

Inputs changed - re-run to update

in the warning colour, even though nothing has actually gone wrong. Hovering it shows the full tooltip:

This node's '{0}' output was computed from earlier input and is now out of date. It has been kept rather than overwritten - re-run the node to update it.

where {0} is the name of the affected output pin, or a comma-joined list if more than one pin is affected.

What this means in practice: the node's previous output is kept exactly as it was computed, not silently replaced by the new, unprocessed input. Press the node's own button under Details > Actions to recompute it and clear the flag.

Wiring rules

Connections are always stored output to input - see Pins and Data Types.

Ctrl+drag to move a wire: holding Ctrl and dragging from a wired connector picks up the far end of that wire instead of starting a new one. Nothing is broken until you release: the new connection is made first and the old one removed second, so dropping somewhere the connection is rejected leaves the original wire intact. Dropping back onto the pin you grabbed is a no-op. Dropping on empty canvas cancels the move without opening the Add Node menu, so the move can never accidentally duplicate the link. Because the gesture is decided the moment you press the mouse button, releasing Ctrl partway through cannot turn it into something destructive. The undo entry is labelled Move Link.

Dropping a wire on empty canvas instead opens the Add Node menu filtered to compatible nodes and auto-wires whatever you pick - see Working in the Graph.

Right-click a pin

If a pin has no wires and cannot be promoted to a subgraph pin, right-clicking it falls through to the canvas menu instead of showing an empty one.

Right-click a node

Right-clicking a node that is not already selected selects it first. The menu's title is the node's own title, or {N} Nodes when several are selected.

A node whose class this build cannot resolve is locked to select, inspect and delete only - Copy, Cut, Duplicate, Connections and Share are all left off its menu (this is the first of the two placeholder states below).

Two placeholder states

A node whose type this build does not have

When a saved graph references a node class this build cannot resolve, it loads as a placeholder instead of being dropped. Its title reads {LeafClassName} (unavailable), or plainly Unavailable Node if even the class name is missing, coloured a desaturated grey rather than error red. Its tooltip:

This node's type is not available in this build: {ClassPath}

Its settings, pin layout and connections have been preserved exactly and will be written back unchanged when you save, so nothing is lost. The node cannot run, and its properties cannot be edited, until a build that provides the type opens the file.

This usually means the graph was made with a newer version, or with a feature that is not present here.

A node whose settings could not be restored

If a node's saved settings cannot be read back, it is badged red instead, with the tooltip: "This node's settings could not be restored from the saved file. Re-pick the source file or re-apply the node's settings."

Studio and Graph › Fundamentals

Pins and Data Types

Every kind of value a wire can carry, from meshes and DNA to weight maps and plain numbers.

What a pin is

A pin is a single typed connector on a node - an input, on the node's input side, or an output, on its output side. Connections are always stored output to input: the graph auto-orients a new wire based on which end is the output and which is the input, so it does not matter which pin you actually drag from. Most input pins accept a single wire, and dropping a second one replaces the first, though a few are declared to accept more than one - see Nodes and Wires for the full wiring rules.

A pin's category is what decides whether it can be wired to another pin at all. Drag a wire out into empty space and the Add Node menu that opens is filtered to nodes with a compatible pin, with its header reading Compatible with {0} - see Working in the Graph.

Pin types

The table below covers every data type currently used by a pin in the library. Counts are pin totals across the whole node library in the current build, not a fixed catalogue - they rise as nodes are added.

Mesh and geometry

Character types

Maps, textures and assets

Asset pins mostly belong to the editor-only nodes described in the Introduction, which read or write Unreal Engine assets: an engine asset has nowhere to live in Studio, which has no project underneath it.

Plain value types

Number covers what the schema internally calls float and double, and Whole Number covers int, int32 and int64 - those are implementation details, not labels you will see in the app itself.

Studio and Graph › Fundamentals

Files, Autosave and Recovery

What a .mmgraph holds, why opening one never runs anything, how autosave protects you, and how node presets are shared.

The .mmgraph document

A graph is saved as a .mmgraph file (file-dialog filter: Mesh Morpher Graph (*.mmgraph)). The current format is version 6; the loader also reads version 5 and upgrades it in memory, but always writes version 6 back out, and files older than version 5 will not load at all.

What is stored in it:

• the graph's stable internal ID
• the graph's display name - the same name set by Edit > Rename Graph... (see The Window), which is why the tab label and the Save dialog's suggested filename both survive a reopen
• graph variables
• comment boxes: id, text, position, size and colour
• every node: its class, its id, its canvas position, and its full property data (compressed since format version 6)
• every connection
• every pin's byte payload - meshes, textures and other bulk data live inside the document itself, addressed by a table of contents at the end of the file so large pins can be loaded lazily rather than all at once

What is deliberately not stored:

• the file's own path on disk, and whether the document has unsaved changes - both are decided fresh each time the file is opened
• a node's message, its severity, and its out-of-date badge - these describe your current editing session, not the saved document (see Nodes and Wires)
• undo history
• selection, pan, zoom, and which subgraph card you were inside
• runtime objects a node builds for itself, such as a decoded texture or a dynamic material - these are rebuilt when the file is opened
• app-level settings such as panel layout, window geometry, recent files, theme and minimap visibility - see the table at the end of this page

A node whose class this build cannot resolve is not dropped when the file loads - it is preserved as the placeholder described in Nodes and Wires, holding its original class and property bytes exactly, and writes them back unchanged the next time you save.

Save behaviour

Save always asks for a destination. There is no quick-save that writes silently over the current file.

Saving to a different file from the one the document came from gives the graph a new internal ID, so the old file and the new one never fight over the same autosave slot. The Save dialog's suggested filename follows the graph's display name, not its on-disk filename - so renaming a graph and then saving suggests the new name - but saving into a path with a different base name does not rename the graph back. On success you see the toast Saved {filename}; on failure, Save failed: {error}.

Unsaved-changes prompts

Closing a document tab, or the app, with unsaved changes:

"{name}" has unsaved changes.

Yes - save before closing.
No  - close and discard the changes.
Cancel - keep it open.

Closing the app while a tool has unbaked edits:

You have unsaved tool edits on the current node.

Yes - accept and bake the changes before closing.
No  - discard the changes.
Cancel - keep the app open.

Switching document tabs with unbaked tool edits shows a similarly shaped prompt with different wording - see The Window.

If the document already has a file on disk, Yes writes straight to it with no further dialog; a document that has never been saved goes through the normal Save dialog instead, and the window only actually closes once the graph is clean. A save that fails never lets the close proceed. Once every open tab has been resolved this way, any leftover autosave sidecars and scratch files for those documents are swept up, so nothing can resurrect itself on the next launch.

Autosave

Mesh Morpher autosaves every 300 seconds (5 minutes) by default, checked every 30 seconds; the interval is controlled by the console variable mm.AutosaveIntervalSeconds ("Seconds between autosave passes over dirty graphs. 0 disables autosave."). Every document with unsaved changes is snapshotted on each pass; a clean document has its snapshot deleted instead. A document whose mesh is mid brush-stroke is skipped for that one pass only - other open documents are still protected.

Where snapshots go:

• a document that has been saved at least once: <its path>.autosave, next to the real file (for example MyGraph.mmgraph.autosave)
• a document that has never been saved: %LOCALAPPDATA%/MeshMorpher/Autosave/<GraphId>.mmgraph.autosave

Every autosave write is atomic - written to a temp file, then swapped in - so an interrupted write can never corrupt the last good snapshot.

Nothing is written from inside a crash handler by design - what survives a crash is only the last periodic snapshot that made it to disk.

The restore prompt on open

If a file's autosave sidecar is newer than the file itself, opening it asks first, in a dialog titled "Restore Autosave":

An autosave of "{filename}" is newer than the file itself (likely from an interrupted session).

Yes - open the autosave (Save afterwards to keep it).
No  - open the file as last saved.

Yes opens the autosave content but keeps the real file as the document's home, and leaves the document dirty so you have to consciously Save to keep the recovered work. No back-dates the sidecar rather than deleting it - your autosaved bytes are kept on disk, but the prompt will not reappear on every future open. If the autosave cannot be staged for opening at all, the last saved version opens instead, with the toast "The autosave could not be prepared for opening, so the last saved version was opened instead. The autosave file has been left untouched."

Separately, unsaved pin edits are recovered from a per-graph scratch file: if any are found for a graph you are opening, a dialog titled "Recover Unsaved Edits" asks: {N} unsaved pin edit(s) from a previous session were found for this graph. Recover them?

At launch, after a crash

Documents that had never been saved when a previous session crashed are restored automatically into new tabs, with the toast Restored {N} unsaved graph(s) from autosave. A snapshot that cannot be read is not deleted - it is renamed with an .unreadable suffix and reported: {N} autosave snapshot(s) could not be read and were set aside as '.unreadable' in the Autosave folder. They are kept in case they can be salvaged, and will not be retried.

Node presets (.mmnode)

A .mmnode file is one or more nodes exported out of a graph, with a title, author, category, tags and description you fill in - file-dialog filter Mesh Morpher Node (*.mmnode). It uses its own file signature, deliberately distinct from a graph's, so opening the wrong file type gives a clear error rather than a confusing one.

Exporting

From a node's right-click menu (see Nodes and Wires): Export Node Preset... writes a file, Save to My Presets... installs straight into your local library. Both open the same dialog, with fields for Title (pre-filled with the node's title, or {N} Nodes for a multi-selection), Author (pre-filled with your OS user name), Category / Tags, and a multi-line Description. A live summary line reads {N} node(s), {bytes} bytes, or Cannot export: {reason} if the selection cannot be exported at all.

Exporting to a file opens an OS save dialog titled "Export Node Preset", defaulting to {Title}.mmnode; on success it toasts Exported / {Title} -> {path}. Installing to your library checks for an existing preset with the same identity first, and if one exists, offers Replace, Keep Both or Cancel, noting: "Either choice only affects My Presets. Any node you already placed from the current install is an independent copy in its own graph and is not touched."

Importing

Four routes, all ending at the same Import Node Preset dialog:

1. File > Import Node...
2. Drag a single .mmnode file onto the app window or onto the graph canvas
3. Paste a shared text envelope with Ctrl+V
4. Settings > Nodes > Import...

The dialog shows the preset's title, author, description, category and tags, what it contains (Contains: {N} node(s) - {friendly class names}), and a short file fingerprint. If the preset carries a Python script, it shows this warning:

"This preset contains a Python script. Nothing runs when you install or place it - scripts only ever run when you press Run. Read the script before you run it, the same way you would a downloaded file. Settings > Scripting can disable scripting entirely on this machine."

And this note always appears at the bottom of the dialog:

"Placing a node embeds a complete copy in your graph. Uninstalling later never changes graphs you have already saved, and a .mmgraph you share opens correctly for people who do not have this preset installed."

Two buttons decide what happens: Install ("Add this preset to My Presets, so it shows up in the Add Node menu on this machine.") and Add to This Graph Only ("Place this preset's node(s) here without installing anything." - disabled when there is no graph open to place it into).

Managing installed presets

Settings > Nodes lists everything installed, with Import... and Refresh buttons, and a per-preset Uninstall. Uninstall is disabled for presets that shipped with the app, with the tooltip "This preset shipped with the app and cannot be uninstalled."; for anything you installed yourself, its tooltip reads "Remove this preset from My Presets. Graphs you already placed it into are not affected." Confirming shows:

Uninstall "{Title}"?

This removes it from My Presets and the Add Node menu. Any graph you already placed it into keeps its own independent copy and is not affected.

The shipped presets live inside the app's own install; your own live at %LOCALAPPDATA%/MeshMorpher/NodePresets/ - you can drop a downloaded .mmnode there by hand, and subfolders are scanned recursively.

Where settings and user files live

Studio and Graph

The Viewport

The two preview panes: how to move the camera, what the menus over the view do, and what every overlay is telling you.

Mesh Morpher previews the mesh in two 3D panes: Viewport and Target Viewport. Viewport (also called the Source pane) shows whichever node is currently selected in the graph; Target Viewport is a second, independent pane for comparing a result against a reference mesh side by side. The two panes share the same chrome - camera controls, view modes, grid and floor, overlays and the Capture dropdown - so everything under this section applies to either pane unless a page says otherwise.

• Navigating - the three camera schemes and their gestures, WASDQE fly, mouse-wheel behaviour, the numpad projection shortcuts, and how Focus (F) frames the mesh.
• View Modes - Lit, Wireframe and the rest of the View Mode menu, the Disable Shadows toggle, and the Buffer Visualization sub-menu.
• Camera and Display - every row on the Camera Speed panel, the Background Color and Wireframe Color swatches, and Reset Defaults.
• Projection, Grid and Floor - the Perspective / orthographic combo, Show Grid and Show Floor.
• Overlays and Readouts - the pane badge, FPS pill, mesh stats dropdown, camera lock, axis gizmo, light widget and the Accept/Cancel banner.
• Capture: Images and Turntables - saving a still image or rendering an orbiting turntable sequence.

Studio and Graph › Viewport

Navigating

Camera schemes, the fly controls, the projection shortcuts and exactly what Focus does in each case.

Camera schemes

Mesh Morpher ships three camera navigation presets. Pick one under Settings > Shortcuts > Camera scheme (see Shortcuts); the active preset changes what plain LMB and the modifier combos do, and the on-screen hint strip below follows it in spirit, though its own text is keyed to projection, not preset (see below).

• Mesh Morpher (default) - "Alt+LMB orbit, Alt+RMB zoom, MMB or LMB+RMB pan, wheel zoom. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE; a plain LMB drag walks the camera."
• Maya - "Alt+LMB tumble, Alt+MMB pan, Alt+RMB zoom, wheel zoom. Plain LMB is left to the active tool. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE."
• Blender - "MMB orbit, Shift+MMB pan, Ctrl+MMB zoom, wheel zoom. LMB (including Alt+LMB) always goes to the active tool. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE."

Holding RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE works the same way under all three presets - it is what changes between them (plain LMB, and what the Alt / Shift / Ctrl modifiers do) that defines a scheme.

On-screen hint strip

A hint strip sits bottom-centre in each pane, on its own row. It shows the gestures available for the pane's current projection, not the chosen camera scheme - the text is the same regardless of which of the three presets above is active:

• Perspective: WASD walk - RMB look - Alt+LMB orbit - MMB pan - Wheel zoom - F focus
• Orthographic: MMB pan - Wheel zoom - F focus

The strip is hidden whenever a tool is active; the Accept / Cancel banner takes over that row instead.

WASDQE fly

These six commands only act while the right mouse button is held. The same hold also drives RMB free-look, so holding RMB and dragging while tapping WASDQE is how you fly through the scene; release RMB and the keys do nothing in the viewport. All six are rebindable under Shortcuts.

Mouse wheel

The wheel does two different things depending on whether RMB is held:

• Wheel + RMB held - adjusts Camera Speed by plus or minus 10% per notch, clamped to 50 - 50000. That clamp is narrower than the Camera Speed spin box's own 1 - 100000 range (see Camera and Display), so scrolling alone cannot push the value as high, or as low, as typing a value directly into the spin box can.
• Wheel alone - dollies the camera forward (or back, scrolling the other way) by half the current Camera Speed per notch. That half-of-Camera-Speed multiplier is fixed and has no control of its own.

Numpad projection shortcuts

Projection is remembered per pane, so the Source and Target panes can sit in different views at once. These shortcuts set the same value as the Perspective combo; see Projection, Grid and Floor.

Focus (F)

F (Frame Selection) behaves differently depending on what is under the cursor and which projection the pane is in:

1. If a sculpt brush is hovering the mesh (Source pane only) and the pane is in perspective, F recentres the camera on the point under the cursor without changing how far away it is.
2. Same case in orthographic: F recentres on the cursor point and also refits the frame width to the Focus Width (Ortho) setting multiplied by the mesh radius.
3. Otherwise, F frames the whole mesh's bounding box. In perspective this uses the Focus Padding (Persp) setting to decide how loose the framing is.
4. With no mesh loaded, F falls back to a fixed point 50 units above the origin, framed at a 200-unit radius.

Every case flies the camera there smoothly rather than cutting instantly. Focus Padding (Persp) and Focus Width (Ortho) are both set on the Camera and Display page.

Camera read-out pill

A pill at the bottom-left of each pane always shows the live camera transform:

A reset button on the pill puts the camera back to its default framing - the same framing logic as Focus (F) above, using the Focus Padding / Focus Width settings, and falling back to the fixed default vantage if no mesh is loaded in perspective. Its tooltip is "Reset camera to default framing", with whatever key is currently bound to Frame Selection appended after it.

Studio and Graph › Viewport

View Modes

Lit, Unlit, Wireframe and the rest, the shadow switch, and the buffer slices you can display instead.

The View Mode combo's button label is the name of the pane's current mode. View mode is set per pane, so the Source and Target panes can each show a different one at the same time.

Modes

A pane starts in Lit, and the mode you leave it in is remembered between launches. None of the entries below carry a tooltip - the label is the only description the app gives for each one.

• Lit
• Unlit
• Wireframe
• Detail Lighting
• Lighting Only
• Light Complexity
• Shader Complexity
• Stationary Light Overlap
• Lightmap Density
• Reflections
• Buffer Visualization

Disable Shadows

A checkbox lower in the same menu, off by default. Tooltip:

"Persistently disable all dynamic shadow casting in the preview viewport. Useful for dense meshes where the shadow pass dominates frame time."

This is independent of which view mode is active - it stays off or on as you switch modes.

Buffer Visualization sub-menu

Below Disable Shadows, a Buffer Visualization sub-menu lets you pick which GBuffer slice to display. Its tooltip:

"Pick which GBuffer slice to display when in Buffer Visualization mode"

Picking any slice in this sub-menu also switches the pane's view mode to Buffer Visualization - you do not need to select that mode separately first. The slices, in menu order, are radio entries with no tooltips of their own:

• Base Color
• Metallic
• Specular
• Roughness
• World Normal
• Ambient Occlusion
• Scene Depth
• Opacity
• Custom Depth

Studio and Graph › Viewport

Camera and Display

Every camera and display value the viewport panel exposes, with its default, its range and whether it applies to one pane or both.

The Camera Speed: N pill opens a panel of spin-box rows rather than a drop-down list. Every row has its own reset arrow that only appears once the value differs from its default - its tooltip is "Restore this value to its default" - and every edit saves to disk as soon as you commit it.

Most rows here are shared: changing them affects the Source and Target panes together. A few are kept per pane instead, so the Source and Target panes can each hold a different value. Each table below says which.

Camera group

Every row in this group is shared between both panes, except Field of View, which is per pane.

The "drag" figure in the Range column is only how far the on-screen slider travels; typing a value still reaches the full range to its left.

See Navigating for what these drive in practice, and Focus (F) for how the two Focus settings are used.

Viewport group

Exposure, Render Scale, Near Clip and Far Clip are kept per pane. Background Color and Wireframe Color are shared.

Reset Defaults

A button at the bottom-right of the panel puts every value above back to its shipped default in one click, plus two values that have no row anywhere in the app:

• Camera Speed 600, Orbit Sensitivity 0.4, Look Sensitivity 0.25, Pan Multiplier 1.0, Min Camera Distance 100, Ortho Zoom Sensitivity 1/2400, Drag-Walk Speed 8.0, Drag-Walk Yaw 0.5, Focus Padding (Persp) 1.2, Focus Width (Ortho) 2.4.
• This pane's Field of View 70, Exposure 11, Render Scale 1.5, Near Clip 1, Far Clip 1000000.
• Background Color returns to the current theme's panel colour - not necessarily the hex value shown above. If you have changed Panel background on the Theme page, Reset Defaults here follows that colour instead of the shipped one.

Studio and Graph › Viewport

Projection, Grid and Floor

Perspective and the six orthographic views, which grid plane each one draws, and why the floor disappears in ortho.

Perspective combo

The same pill that shows the pane's projection - Perspective, Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Front or Back - also holds the Show Grid and Show Floor toggles below. Perspective is the default projection; the six orthographic views sit under an Orthographic section header. None of the projection entries carry a tooltip. Projection is set per pane, and each has its own numpad shortcut - see Navigating.

Switching to an orthographic view for the first time frames a default width of 400 world units.

Show Grid

Checkbox, default on. Tooltip:

"Toggle the world-grid overlay in perspective mode."

Show Floor

Checkbox, default on. Tooltip:

"Toggle the studio floor mesh in perspective mode. Ortho views never render the floor."

Which grid plane shows where

The grid is drawn as three separate planes - one each for XY, XZ and YZ - and only the plane facing you is ever visible:

Turning Show Grid off hides all three planes at once, whichever one would otherwise be showing.

Ortho never draws the floor

The studio floor is a flat mesh that never casts a shadow. It is hidden unconditionally in every orthographic view, regardless of the Show Floor setting, and is additionally hidden in perspective whenever Show Floor is off. In other words, the only way to see the floor at all is perspective projection with Show Floor on.

Studio and Graph › Viewport

Overlays and Readouts

The pane badge, frame rate, mesh statistics, camera lock, axis gizmo, light widget and the rest of the chrome drawn over the view.

Both panes draw the same set of overlays on top of the 3D view. Some are always on; others only appear in specific conditions.

Camera lock

The icon tints to the theme's accent colour when locked on, and dims to grey when off. It starts off and persists across sessions.

Reference-mesh eye

This button only appears on the Source pane, and only once the Scene outliner has a Reference Mesh row pointing at something for this pane - otherwise it is not drawn at all. Clicking it does the same thing as toggling visibility on that Scene row.

Axis gizmo

Three short lines radiating from a centre dot, labelled X, Y and Z, about 28 px across. The axes are drawn back-to-front, so whichever ones face the camera are brighter. Colours are themeable (see Orientation gizmo on the Theme page); the shipped defaults are red for X, green for Y and blue for Z.

Mesh Stats

The Mesh Stats pill's label never changes. Opening it rebuilds a small read-out panel from whichever mesh belongs to this pane - the Source pane's primary mesh, or the Target pane's secondary mesh.

Two empty states replace the whole dropdown with a single line of text instead:

• "No mesh available" - there is no mesh component for this pane at all.
• "Mesh is empty" - a mesh component exists but has zero vertices.

Light widget

A translucent pill at the bottom-right holds two controls, both always visible:

• Intensity slider - vertical, range 0 to 5, default 1.0. Tooltip: "Directional key light intensity. Drag to brighten / dim the main light (Persona default 1.0). The SkyLight provides constant ambient fill."
• Rotation globe - about 40 px across. Tooltip: "Drag to rotate the sun. Mouse-wheel adjusts pitch. Double-click to reset." It paints the cardinal letters F, B, R and L on its face, and prints the current yaw and pitch as whole-degree numbers labelled Y: and P:. Default rotation is pitch -50, yaw -75.

Accept / Cancel banner

Appears bottom-centre only while a tool is active.

Studio and Graph › Viewport

Capture: Images and Turntables

Save the viewport as a PNG or JPEG at up to four times its on-screen size, or render an orbiting turntable as a numbered sequence.

The Capture pill's tooltip sums up both of its sections:

"Save this viewport as a PNG / JPEG at up to 4x its on-screen resolution, or render an orbiting turntable as a numbered image sequence."

Every value in the dropdown persists between sessions.

Save Viewport Image

The save dialog defaults to a folder under your Documents directory, with the file named MeshMorpher_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.

On success, a toast titled "Viewport image saved" shows the resolution and path as its subtext, formatted <width> x <height> - <path>. On failure the toast is titled "Save image failed"; if the pane has no size yet (for example, before any mesh has been opened) the message is "The preview viewport has no size yet - open a mesh and try again."

Turntable (image sequence)

Turntable frames default to the same Documents folder and MeshMorpher_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS base name as a single saved image, numbered from whatever name you give the sequence.

On failure, the toast is titled "Turntable failed to start"; if the preview scene itself is not ready yet, the subtext reads "The preview scene is not available."

Studio and Graph

Sculpt Tools

The brushes and tools that appear in the viewport when a sculpting node is selected, and every setting behind them.

These are the brushes and tools that appear in the viewport once you select an interactive node such as Sculpt Mesh. They are not settings you dial in ahead of time and run once - you work with them live, dragging and stamping in the viewport, and nothing is written back to the graph until you press Accept.

Where the tools live

A sculpting node's UI is spread across four places:

Accept commits

Accept and Cancel sit bottom-centre of the viewport while any tool is active.

• Accept - "Apply the active tool's pending changes and propagate the result to the node's output pin(s)." This is the only thing that writes your strokes to the node's output.
• Cancel - "Discard the active tool's pending changes and exit the tool without writing to the node's output pin(s)."

Nothing you do with a brush is visible outside the node until you press Accept.

In this section

• The Brushes - every tool in the tower, what it does to the mesh, and its default shortcut.
• Brush Settings - the Size, Stroke and Advanced settings shared by every brush, plus falloff, Indicator and Material.
• Symmetry - mirroring strokes across an axis, and why the origin follows the mesh.
• Masking and Selection - painting, marqueeing and filtering which vertices a brush is allowed to reach.
• Stamps, Alphas and VDM - texture stamps, the brush library on disk, and vector displacement maps.
• Sculpt Layers - the stack every stroke records into, and why sculpting starts out blocked.
• Sculpting Shortcuts - mouse gestures, keyboard defaults, undo, and the on-screen hints.

Studio and Graph › Sculpt Tools

The Brushes

Every brush, action tool and gizmo tool the sculpt tower offers, what each does to the mesh, and the settings it adds.

This is every tool the Sculpt Mesh node's tool tower offers. Shortcuts below are the palette defaults - the ten slots (keys 1-9 then 0) are user-editable in Edit > Settings > Shortcuts > Brush Palette, so treat every key here as a starting point, not a fixed binding.

A None button always sits at the top of the tower, on every node. It is not a tool - it just puts down whichever brush is active.

A few things worth being plain about:

• Move, Grab, Sculpt, Smooth, Inflate, Pinch, Plane, Flatten, Clay, Scrape, Fill, Restore, Project, Displace, Blend, Scale and Twist are brushes - you drag or stamp on the mesh with the cursor.
• Laplacian Smooth, Mirror and Delta Mush are action tools, not brushes: selecting them arms no cursor stroke, only the buttons in their floating panel.
• Transform and Lattice Deformer are gizmo tools: selecting them spawns a manipulation gizmo or a cage instead of a brush cursor.
• Plane and Flatten are the same tool. The node maps both entries to the same dispatch, so there is nothing Plane does that Flatten does not.

Animation Sequence Sculpt and Geometry Cache Sculpt offer this same tool set minus Lattice Deformer and Delta Mush.

Settings panels

The tools below open a floating panel of their own. Every other tool in the table above has no settings beyond the shared Brush Settings.

Grab Tool

Grab also uses the shared Depth setting to sink its capture centre below the surface.

Smooth Tool

Button: Apply Smoothing runs the smooth over the whole mesh, or the current selection if one is masked.

Restore Tool

Buttons: Apply Restore (whole mesh or selection), a Right/Left/Up/Down/Front/Back side dropdown paired with Restore Side, and a section list paired with Relative Restore. A second, Relative Restore panel adds Attempt Clip Fix (off) and Clip Offset (0.01).

On the brush itself, Preserve Location is not applied - the GPU brush always restores toward the unshifted baseline. It only takes effect on the whole-mesh Apply Restore action.

Transform Tool

Grid-snap pills for Translate, Rotate and Scale appear in the viewport toolbar while this tool is active.

Project Tool

Also a section list, and an Apply Project button that stays disabled until a Reference or a picked section resolves.

Displace Tool

The full settings table lives on Stamps, Alphas and VDM, since most of them only matter once you turn on Vector Displacement. In brief: Selected Texture picks what to displace with, Magnitude scales the effect, and Vector Displacement switches the brush from a grayscale height stamp to a true tangent-space VDM stamp.

Laplacian Smooth Tool

Buttons: Apply Laplacian and Apply Fix Spikes.

Blend Tool

Button: Apply Blend. As with Restore, Preserve Location is honoured only by the whole-mesh action, not by the GPU brush.

Scale Tool

Twist Tool

Mirror Tool

Button: Mirror.

Delta Mush Tool

Settings are session-only - they reset the next time you activate the tool, rather than being remembered between sessions.

Button: Delta Mush.

Lattice Deformer Tool

Buttons: Regenerate Grid and Reset to Initial.

Studio and Graph › Sculpt Tools

Brush Settings

Size, strength, falloff and the rest of the shared brush controls, including how brush radius is actually computed.

The Brush pill in the viewport toolbar holds the settings every brush shares, in three groups: Size, Stroke and Advanced. They apply no matter which brush is active.

Size

Stroke

Depth is only used by a couple of tools - it acts as an inward crease bias on Pinch, and it sinks the capture centre below the surface for Grab and Move. Other brushes ignore it.

Advanced

Falloff types

The Falloff Type dropdown offers eight shapes: Smooth, Linear, Inverse, Round, Box Smooth, Box Linear, Box Inverse, Box Round.

The four round falloffs share one shape: everything within (1 - Falloff) * Radius of the brush centre is at full strength, then a ramp to the edge:

Indicator pill

The indicator only shows on a real mesh hit - it hides as soon as the cursor leaves the surface, and in marquee mode.

Material pill

General preview settings, grouped into Wireframe and Material.

Tension mode is live while you sculpt - the preview recomputes the tension colour after every deform. Focus and Tension modes also turn shadow casting off on the preview mesh.

Studio and Graph › Sculpt Tools

Symmetry

Mirroring strokes across an axis, and why the symmetry plane keeps tracking the mesh after you move it.

The Symmetry pill in the viewport toolbar mirrors your strokes across an axis, so a stroke on one side of the mesh is applied to both at once.

Its label changes with the state: plain Symmetry when it is off, then Symmetry: X, Symmetry: Y or Symmetry: Z once it is on and an axis is set, or Symmetry: ON if it is on with no axis. Its tooltip is "Symmetry settings - toggle ({0}), cycle axis ({1})" with your current key bindings filled in.

Settings

Keys

Both keys, like the rest of the sculpting shortcuts, only do anything while a brush tool is active.

The origin follows the mesh

The symmetry plane overlay

While symmetry is on, a translucent rectangle with a 4x4 inner grid is drawn on the symmetry plane, sized to the mesh's bounds plus 10%, and the brush indicator gets a second ring at the mirrored position. This overlay has its own switch, independent of symmetry itself, in Settings > Theme > 3D Viewport, and its own colour (default RGBA 0.25, 0.80, 1.0, 0.50 - a translucent light blue). Turning the overlay off does not turn symmetry off - it only stops drawing the plane.

Studio and Graph › Sculpt Tools

Masking and Selection

Paint a mask to limit where the brushes bite, then grow, shrink, blur or invert it. Nothing painted means the whole mesh is editable.

The Weights input pin states the same contract in its own tooltip: "1 is full strength, 0 is frozen, in between feathers."

How to mask

The mask overlay is not tied to mask-paint mode: it shows whenever paint mode is on, or whenever a mask already exists - so leaving mask mode to go sculpt does not hide the tint.

Filter operations

Five GPU operations plus Boundary select, all in the Masking block:

Grow and Shrink can step by world distance instead of by vertex ring - see Grow Shrink By Distance below.

Masking settings

The Weights pin seeds the mask

The Weights input on Sculpt Mesh is how you feed in a mask from elsewhere in the graph, rather than painting one by hand:

When you wire a weight map into Weights, its graded values are uploaded verbatim as the starting mask - so a wired weight map IS the starting mask, feathering included. It takes effect when you select the Sculpt Mesh node, not continuously, and if you also edit the mask by hand afterwards, your edit wins.

Studio and Graph › Sculpt Tools

Stamps, Alphas and VDM

Stamp a grayscale alpha through the brush falloff, or stamp a vector displacement map that can produce real overhangs.

The Alpha pill

Every brush except Displace shows an Alpha pill in the viewport toolbar (Displace has its own texture picker in its panel instead). The pill's label is Alpha when nothing is chosen, or Alpha: {name} once you have picked one.

Once an alpha is active, the on-surface brush indicator swaps from a plain sphere to a flat quad showing the texture, oriented exactly as the stamp will be laid down.

The brush library on disk

Alphas and VDMs are read from two folders:

1. Shipped - inside the plugin, under Resources/Alphas.
2. User - %LOCALAPPDATA%/MeshMorpher/Alphas. This is deliberately outside the install directory, which is read-only for a normal user when the app is installed under Program Files - drop your own files here and they show up alongside the shipped ones.

Both folders are published into the graph's texture registry automatically, so anything in them appears in the Alpha and Selected Texture dropdowns without needing a Load Texture node. The shipped library itself is listed right there in the dropdown - open it to see exactly what your build includes, rather than relying on a fixed count here.

Which format goes in which folder is decided by file extension, not by sub-folder, so your own sub-folders work the same way:

• Alphas - 8-bit grayscale PNG (BMP, TGA and JPG also work; 16-bit grayscale and colour sources are accepted and reduced to Rec.709 luma). White is full brush strength, black is no effect.
• VDMs - OpenEXR, 16-bit half float, 4-channel RGBA, ZIP-compressed. A 1-channel grayscale EXR is rejected as a VDM.

The VDM convention

A vector displacement map replaces the brush's height dome with real, directional offsets. The convention (Native source space):

• Space - tangent/stamp space. Red is the offset along the stamp's U axis, green along V, and blue along the outward surface normal (positive blue = outward). Alpha is unused and written as 1.0.
• Values - signed and zero-centred: 0.0 means no displacement.
• Units - fractions of the stamp footprint's diameter. The shader multiplies by 2 x Radius, so a blue value of 0.25 lifts by half the brush radius - which is why authored VDM values look small.
• Midpoint - derived, never a setting you configure: a float pixel format uses 0.0 as the midpoint, anything else uses 0.5. If an 8-bit VDM has sRGB enabled on its Load Texture node, you will see the toast: "VDM stamp '{0}' has sRGB enabled on its Load Texture node - disable sRGB there, or the gamma-decoded gain will warp the displacement."

The Displace Tool panel

Displace's settings persist between sessions, the same as every other tool's stored settings.

Two buttons sit below the panel:

• Displace - runs the whole-mesh, UV-based height displace. It stays disabled unless mask-paint mode is off, the mesh is loaded, GPU sculpt data is ready, and Selected Texture resolves to something real.
• Fit Amplitude - visible only when Vector Displacement is on, and enabled once a VDM texture resolves. It reads the map on the CPU and sets VDM Amplitude Scale so the peak displacement lands at a sane fraction of the stamp footprint.

The VDM stroke is not a normal stroke

A normal brush stroke, by contrast, re-stamps repeatedly as you drag, spaced and scaled by Strength, Spacing and brush size the same as every other brush. A grayscale texture (or Vector Displacement left off) always uses the normal stroke engine.

If the mesh under the stamp is too coarse to carry its detail, you will see the toast: "The target mesh is too coarse for this VDM stamp's detail - subdivide under the stamp."

Studio and Graph › Sculpt Tools

Sculpt Layers

Every stroke records into the active layer. The stack starts empty, so sculpting waits until you add one.

Every stroke you make records into a layer in the Sculpt Layers stack, in the Details panel. The stack is per node.

The panel's empty state spells out the same thing: "No layers - sculpting is disabled. Add a layer to start sculpting (every stroke records into the active layer; per-layer strength, visibility, delete)."

Buttons

New layers are auto-named "Layer N". The recording layer is whichever one you last clicked (or duplicated, or added) - every stroke goes into that one until you click a different row.

Sculpt layers do not have blend modes - that control belongs to paint layers only.

Saving

The whole stack - every layer, its strength and its visibility - is written into the node when you press Accept, and is restored the next time you select the node and reactivate the tool.

Studio and Graph › Sculpt Tools

Sculpting Shortcuts

Mouse gestures, modifier keys, the hold-and-drag adjustments, the radial brush menu and what undo covers.

All bindings below are the defaults. Every one is remappable in Edit > Settings > Shortcuts, category "Sculpt Brush" for the keyboard commands, or "Brush Palette (number keys 1-9, then 0 + radial menu)" for the ten quick-select slots.

Mouse

Keyboard

Hold-and-drag adjust

While B, N or T is held, a small pill (220x64) follows the cursor showing which value you are editing and its live number to four decimal places: BRUSH SIZE with a cyan dot, FALLOFF with a violet dot, or STRENGTH with an orange dot. The step per pixel of mouse movement for the Size adjust is the Step Size setting.

Radial menu

Hold Space over the viewport to fan the ten palette brushes out around the cursor. Move into a wedge and release to pick it, or press Escape to cancel without picking anything. The menu's centre shows the name of whichever brush you are currently hovering, or "Pick a brush" while the cursor sits in the small dead zone in the middle.

Undo

One undo entry is pushed per stroke, when the stroke commits on release - not continuously while you drag. Each entry is labelled with the tool that made it: "Move Brush", "Sculpt Brush", "Inflate Brush", "Pinch Brush", "Flatten Brush", "Clay Brush", "Scrape Brush", "Fill Brush", "Smooth Brush", "Restore Brush", "Grab Brush", "Scale Brush", "Twist Brush", "Project Brush", "Blend Brush", "Laplacian Smooth", "Mirror Deltas", "Delta Mush", "Displacement", "Transform" and "Lattice Deform" (anything else falls back to "Brush Stroke").

Undoing or redoing a stroke also re-derives the symmetry plane, so the mirror keeps tracking the geometry correctly.

On-screen hints

Studio and Graph

Settings

Everything under Edit then Settings: interface, shortcuts, theme, AI, scripting and installed node presets.

Open Settings from Edit > Settings... or the toolbar's Settings button - both share the tooltip "Open the settings panel". The Agentic panel's own gear icon opens the same window, preselected to the AI category.

The Mesh Morpher Settings window is modeless, so you can keep it open and switch back to the graph or viewport without closing it first. There is no OK, Apply or Cancel button anywhere in it - every row writes its value and saves to disk the moment you change it.

A Categories column on the left switches between six pages:

• General - interface scale, undo limits, landmarks, update checks, camera defaults, masking, the per-pane viewport rows, and the HDRI environment.
• Shortcuts - the camera scheme, every rebindable command, held modifiers, and the brush palette.
• Theme - every colour in the app, grouped by what they paint.
• AI - the Agentic assistant's backend, conversation limits, and API keys.
• Scripting - Wrangle's step budget and its Python stage.
• Installed Nodes - node presets (.mmnode files) installed on this machine.

For where all of this actually lives on disk, see Where Settings Are Stored.

Studio and Graph › Settings

General

Interface scale, undo limits, landmarks, updates, camera, masking, the two viewport panes and the environment image.

Interface

Undo / History

Landmarks

Turning Show landmarks through the mesh off hides landmarks on the far side of the model entirely - it is a plain on/off switch, with deliberately no fade for points that are only partly occluded.

Updates

Mesh Morpher also checks once right after startup regardless of this interval.

Camera (both viewports)

These are the same values the viewport's own Camera Speed panel edits (see Camera and Display), but the spin boxes here use narrower ranges - for example Camera speed only goes down to 50 and up to 5000 here, against 1 to 100000 in the viewport panel.

Masking

This is the one "counts as painted" threshold shared by the mask overlay, the sculpt and deform tools, and the graph's own mask-reading nodes - changing it here changes all of them at once.

Source viewport / Target viewport

The Settings window has two copies of this section, one per pane, each with the same six rows and the same defaults and ranges - only which pane they write to differs.

These match the per-pane rows on the Camera and Display and Projection, Grid and Floor pages - this is just a second way to reach the same values.

Viewport environment (both viewports)

Unlike the section above, environment settings are shared between both panes - there is only one HDRI.

In short: Browse... and Reset always work, but Ground projection only turns on once you have loaded a custom HDRI, and Room radius and Capture height only turn on once Ground projection itself is also on.

Studio and Graph › Settings

Shortcuts

Pick a camera scheme, rebind any command, choose the held modifiers and fill the ten brush palette slots.

Camera scheme

A combo box at the top picks which of the three navigation presets the viewport uses; a paragraph underneath always shows that preset's own gesture list verbatim.

• Mesh Morpher (default) - "Alt+LMB orbit, Alt+RMB zoom, MMB or LMB+RMB pan, wheel zoom. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE; a plain LMB drag walks the camera."
• Maya - "Alt+LMB tumble, Alt+MMB pan, Alt+RMB zoom, wheel zoom. Plain LMB is left to the active tool. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE."
• Blender - "MMB orbit, Shift+MMB pan, Ctrl+MMB zoom, wheel zoom. LMB (including Alt+LMB) always goes to the active tool. Hold RMB to look around and fly with WASDQE."

See Navigating for what these gestures actually do in the viewport.

Rebinding

Every command below is one row: its display name, a button that captures your next key press as its new chord, and a Reset button that is disabled once the command is already at its shipped default.

Rebinding onto a chord that is already in use somewhere else pops this prompt instead of overwriting silently:

"{0}" is already assigned to "{1}".

Reassign it to "{2}"? The existing binding will be cleared.

{0} is the chord you just pressed, {1} is the command that currently owns it, and {2} is the command you were trying to rebind. Confirming clears the old assignment so the chord only ever fires one command at a time.

A Reset All to Defaults button at the bottom of the page puts every shortcut back to its shipped default in one click.

Default bindings by category

General

Graph Editor

Viewport

Sculpt Brush

Viewport View Mode

All four are unbound out of the box - assign a chord here if you want a key for them. See View Modes for the full mode list.

Viewport Camera

Landmarks

Sewing

Hidden from this page entirely unless the simulation nodes are visible to you.

Camera (hold RMB)

These six only fire while the right mouse button is held - see WASDQE fly.

Held Modifiers

Six rows, each a combo choosing Shift, Ctrl or Alt:

Brush Palette

Ten combos, one per numbered slot (keys 1 through 9, then 0 for slot 10, plus the radial menu on Space), each labelled Slot {n} with its key shown alongside. Each combo picks which brush that slot fires: None, Sculpt, Smooth, Grab, Move, Inflate, Pinch, Flatten, Clay, Scrape, Fill, Plane, Restore, Project, Displace, Blend, Scale or Twist.

Dragging a tool from the tool tower onto a wedge of the radial brush menu reassigns that slot the same way.

Studio and Graph › Settings

Theme

Every colour the application uses, and which changes apply live rather than on the next launch.

An intro line on the page itself sets the rule for everything below it:

"Viewport, graph, and document-tab colours apply live; the rest of the app chrome (surfaces / text / overlays) applies on the next launch."

In other words: recolour the viewport, the graph canvas or a document tab and you see it immediately. Recolour general app chrome - panel surfaces, text, buttons, most overlays - and it takes a restart to show everywhere. Where the app states a row's own timing explicitly, this page says so under that row; otherwise, go by the rule above.

A Reset to defaults button restores the built-in theme in one click. Its tooltip:

"Restore the built-in 'Graphite + Azure' theme. Live colours update immediately; restart for the full app chrome."

It resets every colour on this page, plus the viewport colours documented on Camera and Display (Background Color, Wireframe Color).

Accent

Surfaces

All of these apply on next launch.

Interaction overlays

Controls (each independent)

All of these apply on next launch.

Text

Feedback (status colours)

Panel tabs

All of these take effect after restarting the app.

3D viewport

Applies live, except the two pane-badge rows below, which apply on next launch.

Graph editor

Floating tool panel

Details panel

Timeline (frame range)

Landmarks

Code editor (syntax highlighting)

All of these apply live.

One more syntax colour, for string literals, exists in the underlying settings but has no row on this page, so it is not user-editable from Theme.

Studio and Graph › Settings

AI

The assistant backend, its conversation limits, the API keys stored encrypted on this machine, and the local MCP server.

This page configures the Agentic panel's assistant. Most of it is a details panel, so the rows below are grouped by the same categories the app itself uses.

Backend

The model and effort fields for each backend are not exposed on this page - use the model combo in the Agentic panel's own header instead.

Conversation

Chat

Integration

API keys and the MCP token

Below the details panel, hand-built rows hold the actual secrets:

All three provider keys are encrypted with Windows' own per-user encryption (DPAPI) before they touch disk, and are stored only on this machine - never as plain text.

Studio and Graph › Settings

Scripting

The limits that stop an expression or a Python stage from freezing the application, and which interpreter runs it.

"Wrangle expressions are bounded by the step budget (or, with unlimited step budget on, the run-time timer) so a loop cannot freeze the app. Python packages install from a '#@requires' line in the script, not from this page."

That is the page's own summary, and it is the reason every setting below exists: Wrangle runs arbitrary expressions and, optionally, arbitrary Python, so this page is entirely about how it gets stopped if that code misbehaves.

Runtime

Python stage

It ships on. A fresh install with no scripting settings file behind it has the Python stage enabled, because nothing in Mesh Morpher ever runs a script by itself: opening a graph, pasting a node and importing a preset all deserialize without executing anything. The gate that matters is the explicit Run press on the Wrangle node, not this switch. Turn it off if you want the stage refused outright on this machine.

Interpreter

A status line below the path box reads one of three ways, depending on what is set above:

• Interpreter: <path> (isolated) - a custom interpreter path is set.
• Interpreter: built-in 3.11 (isolated) - no custom path, but Isolate built-in interpreter is on.
• Interpreter: built-in 3.11 (in-process) - no custom path, and not isolated.

A Reset to defaults button at the bottom-right puts every setting on this page back to the value the app ships with.

Studio and Graph › Settings

Installed Nodes

Node presets installed on this machine from .mmnode files, and how to import or remove one.

"Presets you or someone else exported to a .mmnode file and installed on this machine. They show up under 'Installed Nodes' in the Add Node menu. Uninstalling never changes a graph you already placed one into. You can organize them into subfolders here or in the plugin's own folder, and a folder can carry Python scripts alongside its .mmnode - both are picked up automatically."

Controls

The table

Row actions

• Open Folder reveals the preset's folder on disk.
• Uninstall removes the preset from My Presets. Its tooltip: "Remove this preset from My Presets. Graphs you already placed it into are not affected." Presets that shipped with the app cannot be uninstalled at all - the button is disabled, with the tooltip "This preset shipped with the app and cannot be uninstalled."

Toasts you may see: "Uninstalled" on success, "Uninstall failed" on failure, and "Could not read the file" if a preset file itself is unreadable.

Studio and Graph › Settings

Where Settings Are Stored

Which file on disk holds which settings, and where saved captures go.

Every settings file lives in a MeshMorpher folder under your Windows user settings directory - %LOCALAPPDATA%\MeshMorpher\ in practice. Everything is plain JSON, not an .ini file.

Legacy fallback

If none of the files above exist yet, Mesh Morpher reads (but never writes) the same file names from a Config folder next to the executable instead - a fallback kept for installs from before this settings folder existed. Once you save any setting, the current location above is used from then on.

Captures

Saved viewport images and turntable sequences default to a folder under your Documents directory, with the base file name MeshMorpher_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS. See Capture: Images and Turntables.

Studio and Graph

Animation

• Delta Mush Animation (Experimental): Runs Delta Mush over every frame of an animation and bakes what it cleaned up into corrective morph targets the animation itself drives.
• Apply Animation Frame: Poses a skinned mesh at one moment in an animation and hands back that pose as a mesh.
• Load Animation (FBX): Imports an animation take out of an FBX file. The keys are stored in the graph itself, so the FBX can move or disappear afterwards and the graph still plays.
• Pose Animation Sequence: Scrub to a frame, pose the skeleton with the gizmo, and the edit is blended over neighbouring frames and cached on the Animation output until Save Animation Sequence writes it into an asset.
• Retarget Animation: Moves a whole animation take onto a different rig's bones, chain by chain, one retarget per frame of the take.

Studio and Graph › Animation

Delta Mush Animation (Experimental)

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

When to use it

Editor only. Runs Delta Mush on every frame of an animation and bakes the corrections into morph targets driven by that animation, so the skinning fix ships with the asset instead of costing a deformer at runtime.

Posing reads bone keys straight off the Animation pin, so a keyframe-only take with no live sequence behind it - a pure FBX import, or one edited past its source asset by Pose Animation Sequence - poses correctly. The baked morph targets still need a live asset to land on: with none, Apply computes the correction and then tells you there is nowhere to save it, rather than discarding the work silently.

How to use it

1. 1

   Connect a rest-pose mesh and an Animation input (from a Load Animation node)

2. 2

   Configure Delta Mush settings

3. 3

   Click "Apply" to process the animation and create corrective morph targets

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Settings

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Studio and Graph › Animation

Apply Animation Frame

Samples an animation at one moment, in seconds, and hands you the mesh deformed into that pose. From there it is an ordinary mesh: measure it, sculpt on it, bake it, compare it against another pose.

When to use it

Samples an animation at one moment, in seconds, and hands you the mesh deformed into that pose. From there it is an ordinary mesh: measure it, sculpt on it, bake it, compare it against another pose.

Pins

Settings

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Studio and Graph › Animation

Load Animation (FBX)

Imports an FBX animation take via the runtime-safe FBX wrapper.

Imports an FBX animation take via the runtime-safe FBX wrapper.

Additionally, in the editor, the node builds a transient Animation Sequence (+ its skeleton asset) from the keyframes and carries its path inside the same "Animation" struct for Delta Mush Animation Corrective.

How to use it

1. 1

   Set the FBX file path + axis/coordinate options on the details panel

2. 2

   The node imports + bakes the animation into the output pin

3. 3

   Wire "Animation" into an "Apply Animation Frame" node or a Delta Mush Animation Corrective node

Pins

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Studio and Graph › Animation

Pose Animation Sequence

Poses the skeleton at a chosen frame of an animation and writes the edit back into the bone keys, blended over Falloff Frames on each side of the posed frame and fading with distance. The selected ...

When to use it

Poses the skeleton at a chosen frame of an animation and writes the edit back into the bone keys, blended over Falloff Frames on each side of the posed frame and fading with distance. The selected range is a hard boundary the edit never crosses - narrow it to protect a section of the take regardless of how large the falloff is.

How to use it

1. 1

   Connect an Animation input (from a Load Animation node) and the rest rigged mesh the animation plays on

2. 2

   Select the node, scrub to a frame, pose the skeleton with the gizmo, Accept

3. 3

   Wire the Animation output into Save Animation Sequence to write it back into an asset

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Studio and Graph › Animation

Retarget Animation

Moves a whole animation take onto a different rig's bones, chain by chain - one retarget per frame of the source take.

When to use it

Moves a whole animation take onto a different rig's bones, chain by chain - one retarget per frame of the source take.

Pins

Settings

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Studio and Graph

Deltas

• Apply Deltas: Copies a shape change from one mesh onto another, even when the two meshes are built differently.
• Apply Deltas (Topo Match): Adds a stored set of vertex movements straight onto a mesh that has the same vertices in the same order.
• Get Deltas: Measures how far every vertex moved between two versions of the same mesh.
• Transfer Pose: Makes one character take another's pose from point and curve landmarks. Splines are limbs; points are joints. Rotation only - the source keeps its own lengths.

Studio and Graph › Deltas

Apply Deltas

You sculpted a change into one mesh and want that same change on a second mesh built from different geometry. Feed the second mesh into Mesh, the unsculpted reference into Target, and the sculpted ...

When to use it

You sculpted a change into one mesh and want that same change on a second mesh built from different geometry. Feed the second mesh into Mesh, the unsculpted reference into Target, and the sculpted one into Morphed Target.

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Deltas

Apply Deltas (Topo Match)

Adds a delta set straight onto a mesh, vertex for vertex. When the delta source and the target share vertex count and order, this is the one to use. It is exact, it costs nothing, and there is no c...

When to use it

Adds a delta set straight onto a mesh, vertex for vertex. When the delta source and the target share vertex count and order, this is the one to use. It is exact, it costs nothing, and there is no correspondence search to get wrong.

Pins

Studio and Graph › Deltas

Get Deltas

Subtracts a base mesh from a sculpted one and hands you the per-vertex offsets. Apply Deltas (Topo Match) is the other half of the pair: this lifts a shape change off one mesh, that replays it on a...

When to use it

Subtracts a base mesh from a sculpted one and hands you the per-vertex offsets. Apply Deltas (Topo Match) is the other half of the pair: this lifts a shape change off one mesh, that replays it on another.

Wire the untouched mesh into Mesh and the sculpted one into Target. Both inputs need the same vertex count and the same vertex order.

Pins

Studio and Graph › Deltas

Transfer Pose

Makes one character take another's pose from point and curve landmarks. Mesh is the source that gets posed, and its vertex count and layout survive. Target is the character whose pose you are match...

When to use it

Makes one character take another's pose from point and curve landmarks. Mesh is the source that gets posed, and its vertex count and layout survive. Target is the character whose pose you are matching; different topology is the whole point. Landmarks carry the correspondence: point pairs for joints, spline pairs for limbs, drawn on each mesh as it currently sits.

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph

Importers

• Load File Mesh: Reads a mesh off disk: FBX, OBJ, GLB, glTF, STL or PLY. Textures the file points at come in with it.
• Load Skeletal Mesh: Brings a Skeletal Mesh asset from your project into the graph, bones and skin weights included.
• Load Static Mesh: A Static Mesh asset out of your project, ready to edit. No bones come with it, so a rigged character wants Load Skeletal Mesh instead.
• Load Animation Sequence: Pick an Animation Sequence out of the project and its keyframes land on the Animation output, copied into the graph so the graph keeps working without the asset around.
• Load Geometry Cache: Pulls a Geometry Cache asset out of the project so the graph can read its frames.
• Load Alembic File: Opens an Alembic (.abc) cache from disk. Frames are read as you ask for them, so a long cache never has to sit in memory all at once.
• Load USD File: Opens a USD file (.usd, .usda or .usdc) and streams its frames in. You can point it at one branch of a big scene instead of pulling in the lot.

Studio and Graph › Importers

Load File Mesh

Available in Mesh Morpher Graph and Mesh Morpher Studio.

How to use it

1. 1

   Set the file path and import settings on the node's details panel

2. 2

   Downstream consumers (sculpt / repair / exporter) read that struct

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Importers

Load Skeletal Mesh

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

When to use it

The skeletal half of Load Static Mesh, editor only for the same reason. It brings a project Skeletal Mesh in with its bones and skin weights attached, which is what Pose Mesh, Paint Skin Weights and every skeleton node need before they will do anything at all.

How to use it

1. 1

   Pick a skeletal mesh asset

2. 2

   Set LOD index / import-vs-render data

3. 3

   Output is the mesh with skeleton data

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Importers

Load Static Mesh

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

When to use it

Editor only. Pulls a Static Mesh that is already in your project into the graph as an ordinary mesh wire. Nothing gets decoded again, and the asset path travels along with the mesh, so Bake Mesh can write your edits back into that same asset later.

Use Import Data decides how the round trip ends. On, you get the original imported geometry, which is what a bake needs. Off, you get the built render data for the LOD you picked, already welded and optimised, which is what the engine actually draws.

How to use it

1. 1

   Pick a static mesh asset

2. 2

   Set LOD index / import-vs-render data

3. 3

   Output is the mesh data

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Importers

Load Animation Sequence

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

Editor-only authoring node that picks a project Animation Sequence asset.

Additive sequences are not supported.

1. 1

   Pick an animation sequence asset in the details panel

2. 2

   Wire the Animation output into Apply Animation Frame or Delta Mush Animation Corrective

Pins

Settings

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Studio and Graph › Importers

Load Geometry Cache

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

When to use it

Reads a Geometry Cache asset already in your project as a streaming pin. This is the project-asset counterpart to Load Alembic File and Load USD File, and its frames arrive already oriented for MeshMorpher, so there is nothing to convert.

How to use it

1. 1

   Pick a geometry cache asset

2. 2

   Wire the StreamingCache output onward

   Into Geometry Cache Sculpt, Get Streaming Geometry Cache Frame, or an export node.

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Importers

Load Alembic File

The way an animated cache from Maya, Houdini or 3ds Max gets into a graph. It streams: frames come off disk as something downstream asks for them, so a thousand-frame cache costs about what one fra...

When to use it

The way an animated cache from Maya, Houdini or 3ds Max gets into a graph. It streams: frames come off disk as something downstream asks for them, so a thousand-frame cache costs about what one frame costs.

There is no Load button. Pick a file and it reads, and it reads again the moment you change any setting below, so getting the orientation right is a matter of nudging Preset or Rotation and looking at the result.

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Importers

Load USD File

The USD counterpart to Load Alembic File. It streams a stage's frames in as something downstream asks for them, so scene length costs you nothing up front.

When to use it

The USD counterpart to Load Alembic File. It streams a stage's frames in as something downstream asks for them, so scene length costs you nothing up front.

What it adds over the Alembic loader is Prim Filter Path and the purpose switches. A production stage carries far more than the one character you want, in several detail levels at once, and those settings are how you take the branch you need and leave the rest on disk.

There is no Load button. Pick a file and it reads, and it reads again the moment you change any setting below.

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph

Exporters

• Write OBJ: Writes the mesh out as an OBJ with a matching .mtl beside it. It can pair the triangles back into quads on the way out.
• Write DNA: Saves the incoming MetaHuman DNA out to a .dna file, for backup or for handing to another character.
• Export To Skeletal Mesh: Makes a new Skeletal Mesh asset in your project from the incoming mesh. Hand it no skeleton and it builds one from the mesh's own bones.
• Export DNA To Skeletal Mesh: Turns MetaHuman DNA into a Skeletal Mesh asset with its joints, skin weights, morph targets and physics set up. Needs the MetaHuman Character plugin enabled in the project.
• Bake Mesh: Writes your edits back into the asset the mesh came from, along with its skeleton, DNA, other LODs and bound grooms. The mesh has to have come in through Load Skeletal Mesh or Load Static Mesh.
• Write FBX: Saves the incoming mesh as an FBX. Its textures land in a folder next to the file and get wired into the materials, so move the FBX and you have to take that folder with it.
• Write GLB: Packs the mesh, its bones and its base colour textures into one .glb you can hand straight to a web or realtime viewer. Normal and roughness maps do not make the trip.
• Export Geometry Cache to Alembic: Writes an animated cache out to an .abc file one frame at a time, so a long cache costs no more memory than a short one.
• Export Geometry Cache to USD: Sends an animated cache to a USD file, a frame at a time. Save as .usdc for the compact binary, .usda if you want to be able to open it in a text editor.
• Export to Geometry Cache: Bakes an animated cache, sculpt included, into a Geometry Cache asset in your project. The vertex count has to hold steady across every frame.
• Export to Texture Asset: Saves the texture on its input pin into a real project asset, so a map you baked here survives after you close the app.
• Write Alembic: Writes one still shape to an .abc with every UV set, which is what a modelling handoff to Maya, Houdini or ZBrush wants. For a moving sequence use Export Geometry Cache to Alembic instead.
• Write IMG: Writes the connected texture out as an image file. You pick the location and the format each time.
• Write PLY: Binary PLY carrying positions, normals and vertex colours. This is the format scanning and point-cloud tools trade in.
• Write STL: Shape only, in the binary STL that 3D printers and CAD tools read. UVs, colours, materials and skeleton all get dropped on the way out.
• Write USD: Writes one still shape to a USD file with every UV set, its vertex colours and shaded materials. For a moving sequence use Export Geometry Cache to USD instead.
• Save Animation Sequence: Writes the Animation pin's bone keys into a live Animation Sequence asset - the pin only ever caches edits, this is what materializes them. Editor only.
• Write Animation FBX: Saves the incoming animation's skeleton and its bone keyframes as an FBX - including any in-graph pose edits already baked into the wire.

Studio and Graph › Exporters

Write OBJ

OBJ out, optionally with a sibling MTL, and with quads preserved if the mesh has them.

When to use it

OBJ out, optionally with a sibling MTL, and with quads preserved if the mesh has them.

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Exporters

Write DNA

Saves the upstream DNA payload to a .dna file on disk. Snapshot a DNA partway through a chain, hand one to another tool, or keep a backup before a Bake DNA Geometry.

When to use it

Saves the upstream DNA payload to a .dna file on disk. Snapshot a DNA partway through a chain, hand one to another tool, or keep a backup before a Bake DNA Geometry.

It writes what is on the wire and nothing else. If the DNA needed fixing, that had to happen upstream; this node has no opinion about the contents.

How to use it

1. 1

   Connect the DNA input

2. 2

   Click Write DNA and choose a destination

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Exporters

Export To Skeletal Mesh

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

When to use it

A new Skeletal Mesh asset out of a mesh that carries bone attributes, plus a skeleton asset too if you do not supply one.

For a rig built inside the graph by Auto-Rig, Skeleton Edit or Auto-Skin, with no source asset to bake back into, this is the way out. When there is a source asset, use Bake Mesh.

How to use it

1. 1

   Connect a mesh with bone data

2. 2

   Optionally set a skeleton in the settings

3. 3

   Click Export and choose the asset path

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Exporters

Export DNA To Skeletal Mesh

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

When to use it

Turns a DNA into a fully set-up MetaHuman Skeletal Mesh asset: joints, base mesh, skin weights, morph targets, plus the archetype's physics, LOD settings and post-process anim blueprint. This is what makes a DNA usable in a level. Editor only.

How to use it

1. 1

   Connect DNA data

2. 2

   Select export type (Face/Body/Combined)

3. 3

   Click Export and choose the asset path

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Exporters

Bake Mesh

Editor-only node. Runs only in Mesh Morpher Graph inside the Unreal Editor, because it reads or writes Unreal Engine assets. Not available in the standalone Mesh Morpher Studio app.

When to use it

Editor only. Writes the edited geometry back into the project asset it came from, closing a Load Skeletal Mesh or Load Static Mesh round trip. It can take the reference skeleton, the skeleton asset, an attached DNA, re-projected morph targets, higher LODs and bound grooms along with it.

The Mesh input has to originate from one of those loader nodes, because that is where the asset path comes from. A mesh that came from a file import has nowhere to bake to, and the node will say so.

For a new asset instead of overwriting the source, Export Dynamic Mesh To Skeletal Mesh.

How to use it

1. 1

   Connect the modified mesh, tracing back to an asset loader

2. 2

   Choose what the bake should write

3. 3

   Click Bake Mesh

Pins

Settings

Studio and Graph › Exporters

Write FBX

For a handoff to a DCC package where the rig has to survive, FBX is the format and this is the node. It goes out through the bundled FBX SDK.

When to use it

For a handoff to a DCC package where the rig has to survive, FBX is the format and this is the node. It goes out through the bundled FBX SDK.

How to use it

1. 1

   Connect a mesh to the Mesh input pin

2. 2

   Tweak axis / scale / ASCII settings on the details panel

3. 3

   Click Write FBX — choose a destination, file is written