5D.Morpheus

Welcome to the wonderful world of morphing! Morphing has become very popular over the past few years in the film and television industries, as special effect where an object "transforms itself" in to another object over a series of frames.

Source - the ball	Destination - the box

Basically it is a dissolve between clip A and clip B. But if you just did a dissolve between say a beach ball and a box, then you would distinctly see the squareness of the box mixing into the roundness of the ball.

Mid Frame Dissolve	Mid Frame Morph

Morphing lets you distort the shape of the box, making it rounder, and the ball starts to get corners, as you mix from one to the other.

S->D Mid Warp	D->S Mid Warp	Mix the two for a Mid Frame Morph

So how do you achieve the effect?

• you must decide which are the co-responding parts in the source and destination images.
• create curves on the images to describe which part in the source image, is going to map to the destination image.
• decide on the speed of the movement which changes the shape.
• decide on the rate of the dissolve which mixes the warped images.

Using a circle turning into a square is a very simple example but once you get the hang of doing this basic morph, you will understand the principles involved and be able to apply them anywhere.

First some terms that are used throughout this help file:

• source - the image you want to change from....
• destination - the image you want to change to.
• S - source.
• D - dest.
• warp - the change of shape of either the source or dest.
• S->D - source to dest warp.
• D->S - dest to source warp.
• mix - dissolve between the S->D and D->S images.
• morph - the full monty; S->D + D->S + mix.

Index