What is deform?

Deform is a real-time mesh deformation system for the Unity game engine. It lets you apply visual effects that change the shape of 3D models while a game is running, rather than baking those shapes into static files beforehand. You can stack multiple deformers together in layers, combining effects to produce complex animations and transformations on the fly. A deformer in this context is a single effect that modifies a mesh, which is the 3D geometry making up a model. Examples include bending, twisting, stretching, squishing, and bulging. Deform provides a library of these effects that you attach to any object in Unity and configure through the Unity Inspector, the editor's graphical panel for adjusting component settings. No custom shader code or low-level graphics knowledge is required to start using them. The system is built with performance in mind. It uses Unity's Job System and multithreaded processing, meaning deformation calculations run across multiple CPU cores rather than one at a time. This matters for games, where deformation effects need to update every frame to stay smooth. The multithreaded approach keeps the cost of running many deformers at once low enough for real-time use. The intended users are game developers working in Unity who want more expressive character animation or interactive mesh effects than Unity's built-in tools provide out of the box. Common applications include squash-and-stretch animation, terrain that reacts to characters, soft-body-like visual effects, and procedural shape changes triggered by gameplay events. Deform is written in C# and integrates directly with the Unity Editor. It is not a standalone program. Developers add it to their Unity project, attach deformer components to scene objects, and configure the effects through the editor without writing low-level deformation code from scratch.