Morphs. It seems as if they are everywhere you turn lately. Even if you missed Michael Jackson’s video, “Terminator 2,” and the latest Star Trek movie, you’ve surely seen TV ads featuring last year’s minivan “evolving” into this year’s model. We even saw a morph on Rush Limbaugh’s TV show: Bill Clinton’s face transforming into Jimmy Carter’s. Of course, those of you who attended the November SMUG meeting got to see an elaborate morph involving five SMUG members.
A morph (from metamorphosis) is a two dimensional, spatially warped (non-linear) crossfade, and you can now do it on your own Mac.
The basic idea is to choose two images (photographs, drawings, etc.) and define them as a Start Image and an End Image. The next step is to place “key points” at corresponding places on each image. Lines may optionally link two points. The placement of these points and lines is crucial to an effective morph.
After defining the key points, you have two choices. You might choose to create a single image that is a blend of the two originals, or you can make a QuickTime movie of the actual changes taking place. These animated sequences are quite striking and represent the reason for the popularity of the effect.
The process is actually fairly easy to accomplish, although it does take time to get everything set up just right. First, you must assemble your source images. The only limitation here is that they must be the same size and reslution. If they are not, you’ll need to resample and/or resize them in a program like Adobe Photoshop.
The placement of the key points is easy but tedious. Morph features very few tools, and their functions are fairly obvious once you get started.
You’ll need at least a Classic II computer with plenty of RAM and hard disk space. Five megabytes of memory is the minimum, but you’ll be happier with eight. You’ll also need at least 10 megabytes of hard disk space, System 6.0.7 (or later), and QuickTime.
A number of sample files are supplied to help you get started.
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