Uvw deformer transfer

Lately I’ve been doing a thought experiment on a solution to transfer deformers between rigs. This is not so difficult if you keep the topology the same. But inevitably meshes get changed and “improved” and you end up having to do the same work over again. I was curious if anyone has come across tools for this? I was thinking that if you had the same UVW coordinates then transfering SDKs and blend shapes (because vertex order would be different as well) could work.

In the past I’ve tried using a wrap deformer to morph to the new mesh but the results were not as good as I wanted.

You may well have seen this already but just in case:
http://petershipkov.com/tutorials/blendShapes/blendShapes.htm

I haven’t tried this technique myself so I can’t speak for its robustness or caveats but in theory it sounds pretty magical.

That link is still very specific to the vertex order of the mesh, though. You would have to start with the original mesh and make edits on it until you ended up with your target mesh. But what if you had a new mesh with totally different vertex order and you wanted to transfer all your deformers?

I was chatting with our rendering guru and he threw another variable into the mix. pTex is gaining popularity and the act of making uv maps is going to go away. I’m not that familiar with pTex but it brings up the same question - if the topology changes, how does pTex deal with that?