Load left and right layouts independently

[alspong]

I want to be able to load left and right layouts independently, so that much the same way as I load photo1 or photo2, I could load layout1 or layout 2. This would make it easy to reuse photos in different combinations.

Also, scripting to allow automated loading of photos and layouts would allow you to make hundreds of morphs from a few layouts and photos. You would set up a layout for each face, then have morpheus morph every combination of photo.

[Ark]

You can easily script Morpheus currently since the file format is all XML and can be passed on the command line if the first character is a * to avoid even having to create temp files.

[alspong]

I'm not sure what you mean by passing info along to the command line. Can Morpheus render from the command line? I think it will be easy enough to generate the aml files in the combinations I want, and I can tell Morpheus to run a particular aml file from the command line, but that's as far as I can get...are there output options etc and where can I find out more info?

Thanks!

Al

[Ark]

There are some hidden options you can use to control Morphues via the XML but not for automatic or invisible rendering. The next version of Morpheus will support these things though.
What I mean by the * is that you can call Morpheus like:
Morpheus.exe "*<?xml version="1.0"?><arks_morpheus_layout><morphs><morph></morph></morphs></arks_morpheus_layout>"
instead of putting the xml in a tmp file

[schmatthes]

Hi,

I am not sure what version was up-to-date 2 years ago in this thread.

You said the "next version" would support automatic rendering so I was hoping version 3.0 is one of the next versions.
Could you please provide a sample XML if this feature exists?

Many thanks in advance
[/quote]

[Ark]

At the time the previous posts were written, v1.85 was the current version.

Morpheus v3.00 still supports the same method of loading the XML formatted *.aml file from a temporary file on the command line or XML placed directly on the command line following a '*'.

All of the relevent control tags should appear inside the control tag in your layout:
<arks_morpheus_layout><control></control></arks_morpheus_layout>

The following options can appear inside of the control tag:
<require_version value="3"/>
<close_after_render value="1"/>
<automatic_render value="1"/>

These should be easy enough to figure out what they do.
The other option available is the <messages> tag which can appear inside of the <control> tag.

Two types of <message> tags can appear inside of the <messages> tag, which will send messages to other windows using the SendMessage API:
<message type="after-render" hwnd="" msg="" data=""/>
<message type="at-close" hwnd="" msg="" data=""/>

[schmatthes]

thanks a lot - this is really a great feature!

I added that directly in my *.aml files so I can render using a batch file.
If I need to edit them with the GUI again I just set "<automatic_render value="0"/>".

Anyway I think using XML as a file format is an excellent idea.
I already use text editors and find/replace scripts ;-)

[Ark]

Yes, we do think that XML files for saved formats like this are a good idea. It is too bad that more programs do not use XML like this. It provides a powerful way to tweak your morph layout in other ways with simple and common text editing tools.

One thing to note is that if you load your layout into Morpheus and re-save it, the <control> section is not saved back to the .aml file, but you may have noticed that already anyway.

Also note that if you use the clipboard functions in Morpheus (cut, copy, paste) that the clipboard data format is plain-text XML, so you can copy from Morpheus and paste into Notepad if you want to tweak the clipboard data (which is typically the coordinates of the dots).