Animating a mesh directly (without rig)?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I was wondering if there were a way to animate vertices on a mesh to change and morph them into different poses and shapes instead of using a rig. I know one’s first instinct is to use shape keys, but what I’m looking for is to completely change how a mesh looks from start to finish, like deleting and adding faces, instead of simply moving vertices to another location. Basically, what I’m going for is kinda like the freedom claymation or 3D pencil animation. I tried using Stopmagic, but I’ve been having problems with it, as there doesn’t seem to be an option to have the mesh interpolate between shapes and only change per frame, and there is no option to copy and paste vertices to other frames.

Is there any way to do this?

2

The short and easy basic answer is, no.

There are certainly ways you can delete faces and points on that sort of thing within the scope of geometry nodes, but that’s not a path you need to go down. It’s just not going to end well.

3

Ah man. I wanted to animate a loose rubberhose-esque character that could changes and morph (particularly the hands, face, and body type).

4

3D isn’t great for that kind of thing. It’s definitely possible, but it’s not going to be fun or easy. For changing and morphing, you might look into things like this:

Even still, though, it’s going to be much easier to do this with a rig.

5

there is a free add-on “animall” with which you can freely animate vertices. Maybe that helps you?

6

You might also take a look at the Keymesh addon, which I haven’t used - but, it looks like more traditional “clay type” animation is sort of it’s thing.