Does anybody know the answer ?
Is it possible in Unity to deform, at run time, just a selected part of a pre made model ?
Someone asked this question in Unity forum, a time ago
The answer was rather confused ...as usual
It is not true that, generally speaking, Unity is only for artist but it is true that ,for a reason or an other , 3dgs members are better programmers

well like i said, you would probably have to write down the vertices you want to move and then access them from the mesh.vertices array, move them and apply them again.

From your editor of choice you can get the local coord of the vertices of your hero's chest
These positions are stored in the "Vertices" array
To access this array you need an index for each vertex of the chest
My question is
How do you get these indices in Unity ?

you could write a few lines of script that loops through the vertices and draws the indices at their locations. or you look up the indices in your modeler like captain kiyaku mentioned.

well
You would admit that 3dgs is more easy friendly
You click on the vertex and you get your index
that's it

I don´t see a problem with this taking 5mins longer in Unity, as you can save that time at other places when using Unity. Like for example when publishing the same project for Mac and iPhone and not only PC...

you dont see a problem with this ?
Suppose your model has 10.000 vertices
Do you draw all of them with one call ?
Even at their location maybe
Do you loop through them step by step , lets say 10 vertices per call
1000 calls ?

That only has to be done once, to create a lookup table. And one would anyways just use some basic animation for something like that or a shader. One can also do a lot of cool stuff with vertex colors.
Also a loop through 10k vertices is not really a problem on current computer hardware. Also polygonal collision detection has to do it as well (can be optimized in some ways, but this is the same case for looping through those vertices for your animation).

I really dont understand why some people can reason only in term of black and white
I myself think that Unity, generally speaking, is better than 3dgs
I myself think that Unity3d is a good engine also for programmers
I myself switched to Unity
I simply said that "up to a certain extent " it it is correct to claim that 3dgs is still more programming oriented
Vertex manipulation is a typical example
Ok I said that Unity does not allow vertex manipulation
I should say Unity does not allow a user friendly vertex manipulation
However I am pretty sure that none of members who posted in defense of Unity have never manipulated a vertex in Unity
Otherwise they can not seriously claim that it is not a problem

For your information even Unity3d staff admited that vertex manipulation is rather limited and you know how proud Unity people are

They promised to fix this issue in the next release

the first approach should work but you can not draw all the indices at their location at the same time
it would be a bloody mess
The second approach seem to be faster but I wonder whether ìt really works
I mean, the coords which you read in your editor and the figures stored in the "Vertices" array are, of course, related numbers but are they also the same numbers?
If I import the same model from different file formats I get different scale factors and different global coords
Did all file format store exactly the same local coords for the same model ?