Getting Help with Morphing Technique

[Paul]

I'm being hindered by the way Morpheus makes triangles out of dots rather than letting me explicitly define enclosed spaces from picture 1 to map onto other spaces in picture 2.

I having trouble getting one particular morph I'm working on to do what I want it to. It would be very hard for me to describe in words just what the problem is. Is there a place I can post pictures 1 and 2, and some sample morphs between them to show what is going wrong? Hopefully then someone could tell me how to deal with my difficulty.

TIA,

Paul

[Ark]

All you can really do is place a few extra dots or move your dots around so that the triangles are created in a different way. There is no way to specify the triangles edges yourself. In the future, Morpheus will let you connect dots with lines to force a triangle edge.

[Paul]

Thanks for the response. I've tried a great number of variations without success, so again I must ask:

Is there a place I can post my (would be) morph for specific advice?

Glad to hear about the anticipated upgrade. Is there an ETA?

[Ark]

We do not provide any specific place to put your morph, but if you do find a place of your own, you can link to it from this forum, and we will see what we can do to help you out.
The next release of Morpheus is a major overhaul and will take some time still before it is ready. We have no set date for it yet, only that it will be done when its done.

[Paul]

>We do not provide any specific place to put your morph,
>but if you do find a place of your own, you can link to it
>from this forum, and we will see what we can do to help
>you out.

Ok, I've thrown up a web server on my laptop, which is always powered on, so these links should work except when I'm rebooting:

To illustrate a poem I wrote, I'm trying to create a morph between a Moluccan Cockatoo and an Angel. Here's a link to take 1:

http://66.215.159.66:8000/morphs/Prinni ... s_gif.html


This work, obviously very much in progress, is a difficult morph. For one thing, Rebecca Coleman's "Angel Head" is almost the perfect angel to morph to from a Moluccan Cockatoo, and I'm loath to use another. The face, however, is close to full on. I've found it impossible, on the other hand, to find a decent Moluccan Cockatoo photo in which the bird faces the camera directly enough to show both eyes. It's a fairly unflattering angle for that kind of bird; and the few, two-eyed Moluccan 'too photos I've found in which the bird has been good looking have been very small and low res. So I'm stuck with mapping a full face to a profile.

One thing I'm really unhappy with is the way the top of the angel's head "caves in." I'd be interested in your thoughts on avoiding that; but that's not my main question.

For reference, I'm providing "stills" of the starting (cockatoo) and ending (angel) images:

http://66.215.159.66:8000/morphs/too.jpg

http://66.215.159.66:8000/morphs/angel%201%20edited.jpg


I call your attention to the flaming-orange crest feathers in the starting photo. Please notice that they contain a notch shaped like a "U" lying on its side. Now I ask you to look at the angel and note that the hair that frames her face is also a "U," in this case inverted.

What could be more natural than to map the cockatoo's orange crest feathers, rotated roughly 90 degrees clockwise, onto the angels golden curls? The problem is that, when I do so, triangles are created outside of the crest area, as well as within it, that result in the appearance of a second, miniature, off-center, copy of the angel's face, that moves and swells to join its counterpart:

http://66.215.159.66:8000/morphs/Prinni ... 4_swf.html

This definitely is not the effect I'm going for. How do I get around it?

Thanks very much for your help,

--
Paul

[Ark]

There really isn't anything you can do to avoid things caving in or expanding out of nowhere when you are using pictures that don't line up very well. Really the only advice I can give here is to either find a picture of the bird from the front showing both eyes, or find a picture of an angel from a profile view. If you morph from a profile to a front view, one side of the front view is going to have to come from somewhere in the animation, there isn't a way around that.
The same thing applies to rotating pieces of a morph. There likely isn't a way to accomplish a rotation without having some of the triangles overlap or fold under eachother, creating the heavy distortion lines or duplication of parts of the picture. One thing you can try for this is to check the "Mask Border Triangles" option in the Options window. This basically turns off 4 invisible dots location at the corner of each picture. You can add back in your own dots near the corners, and then have more control over the entire triangle movement, but it will be difficult to keep your entire preview area "filled" because as the triangles move you will see empty space colored the background color. If you don't have a problem throwing other tools into the mix, you could try adding a solid color border around your two pictures, creating a morph larger then needed, then crop the rendered movie to eliminate the borders at the end.

[Paul]

Ok, thanks.

I might try some of your suggestions--or I might just wait for the next release and see if the ability to close off solid areas solves some of my problems.

[Ark]

Perhaps when the next release nears completion I can put you on the beta-testers list and you can suggest improvements or new features to better help you accomplish the types of morphs you want.

[Paul]

Thanks, that would be a privilege!

[Ark]

You can sign up to beta test future versions at viewforum.php?f=4