Topic: blender armature or shape keys?

[ratty redemption]

i recently started rigging my alien jellyfish model, after getting distracted with learning compositing nodes, which i love using in 2.6, and i've successfully rigged two of the tentacles to work with spline ik's and action constraints, next i intend to work on the dome, but as this model might oneday be exported to a game engine, i'm wondering if i should use bones for the deformation or shape keys? do many game engine support the latter?

[kat]

Basically if you have any intention to export for in a game, use bones. Some games do support shapekeys but they tend to be used for specific functions that can be tricky or time consuming to do with bones, facial movement for example. That means generally speaking they have limited support (you might still be able to use SK to rig and animate but you'd need to be able to 'bake' the motion to the Action editor as pose keys (keyframes markers) where none-supported export was needed.

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat, and i think i understood all that. luckily the animating i have in mind for this model could all be done with bones afaik, so i'll go with that route. my abstract background to the first of the jellyfish videos, which i finished a few weeks ago, does use sk and displace modifiers, but i could probably reproduce similar effects with bones, although i'll leave that for another time.

i'm intending to post some wip images and possibly wip videos of this project in the near future.