Animating with Morphs

by David Goodman

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Everyone knows how film and TV has used the morph sequence. In 3d, we use the morph for more than just the effect of transforming a little girl into a tiger. 3d Studio Max has the Compound Object: Morph. It can be used just like the Hollywood effects for transformation of a little girl, but you can use it for making animation much easier. In the AVI above, the morph was used to wreck a Corvette and Lumina mini-van. The effect on the van was done by selecting certain vertices and "pushing" them into the van's frame at the correct time. Since the damage done to the front of the Corvette is more complex, I chose to animate it using a Morph Target.

The setup for morphing in 3d Studio Max is pretty simple. The one thing you have to keep in mind is that your morph object and morph target must have the same number of vertices. This is not a problem when you want to simply wreck a car, but can be more challenging when want to turn the car into a 747. Anyway, let's get started.

Open a new project in Max or save your current work and click on File, Reset. In the top viewport, create a teapot with a Radius of around 30 (Max Units). Create a clone of Teapot01. Click on the Select and Move Icon. l Now hold down the shift key, click and hold over the teapot and drag away from it. Let go of the click and hit Okay in the resulting command box to name the clone Teapot02.

Right Click on Teapot02 and select Convert to Editable Mesh. Click on the Modify tab, then choose Sub-Object: Vertex. The teapot should be covered with blue dots representing the vertices.

Okay now deform the teapot however you like. Select the vertices in the area that you wish to deform and move or rotate them to your liking.

Assuming you're using the default timing for the animation of 101 frames (0-100), move the time slider to 100 or enter 100 in the frames box and hit enter. Click on the Create tab, click the Geometry button and select Compound Objects from the drop-down box. Select Teapot01, then click on Morph, click Pick Target. Select Teapot02 and play the animation. You can delete or hide Teapot02 at this point and continue with your project. That's that the basics of using morph targets for animation. You can use this same technique to animate characters speaking, cars crashing, clouds changing, etc.That's it! Pretty simple. Please let me know if this tutorial was helpful to you! Thanks!