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Automated morphing
I am working on a project where I need to loop a live actor performing a series of repetitive movements. He performs each move for 4 or 8 bars of music. At the end of each movement, his arms and legs arrive back to approximately the same position, but not close enough that I can loop without a noticeable jump.
Crossfades don’t look clean enough, so I have been using the Reshape effect. I create a mask at the end of the loop and set it as the Source Mask. The Destination Mask is created from the beginning point of the loop. I use enough correspondence points to make it look smooth. Then I set key frames from 0% to 100% over about half a beat of music and he gets morphed back to his starting point. It works pretty well.
The only snag is that I have about 120 of these things to do. It is very time consuming drawing all those masks. Does anyone know of an automated way to do this?
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8 Replies
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Nope, not in AE and in general there are only few apps of this type out there. I believe you can find one currently on sourceforce.net, but as to how usable it might be I don’t know. I also dimmly recall some shareware app a few years ago, but also don’t know if its around any longer.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Look for Winmorph. It’s a shareware app, but works pretty good and is easy to use. Hope that helps.
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You can maybe save some time using either RE:Flex Morph or Twixtor. The prep would be slightly different, and in some cases you will have to do some shape animation anyway.
With RE:Flex Morph, you could for example make a comp where all your elements are separated by a black frame and you animate the Key-Pix ON-OFF using the black frames as reference. Your turn Auto-Align ON and if it’s not automorph well enough, well you had shapes. You can in a case like that as there is sections without morphing in-between always reuse the same shapes, default them to be out-of-screen so they have no impact (the Mask menu is not animatable).
With Twixtor, you can put your footage into comp1 and leave Twixtor at speed 100% then in Comp2 use timeremapping to define transitions (you could also do it directly in Twixtor in “Frames” mode).
eg: put Keyframes Frame 1 = Frame 1, Frame 8 = Frame 8, Frame 10 = Frame 9, Frame 18 = Frame 17, Frame 20 = Frame 18… (so a bit of book keeping). In the case of Twixtor, you have to animate using Masks or not.
Both techniques would provide flexibility, allowing you to choose to make a 2 frames transition, to shrink your 8/8 to 7/7 with a two frame transition…
Pierre
http://www.revisionfx.com -
We’ve used FlexMorph here for it too, worked well. You’re not shooting greenscreen by any chance? The reason I’m asking is that if you’re keying the background you might get usable masks from the AutoTrace function. Just a thought,
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios -
I have a demo of RE:Flex working now. The Auto-Align function gets me 95% of what I need. The trouble spots can be handled by small open masks. Looks like a plug that could pay for itself pretty quick.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I can now plan to spend XMas watching football instead of crunching through 120 masks.
Warren
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Pierre,
The Twixtor two frame transition is really cool too. With most loops, I only need to generate a couple Twixted frames to make the movement look fluid.
Thanks. This works even better than the morphing.
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funny, I would choose crunching the 120 masks over watching football.
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It looks like I have the exact same task at hand: Creating loops from an actor talking in a green screen setting. Full body shot with very similar positions that need to seamlessly morph. I would love to exchange experiences with WR Sampson and glennser who seem to have mastered that task. How can I get in contact with you?
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