Any techniques for a moving face morph?

[beaker]

You can do this in 2d with a spline warper in Shake, Elastic Reality, RE: Flex, etc... The Star Trek one was pure 2d.

In 3d you model both Faces and do a blendshape/morph between the two. You animate the 3d face model to match both plates of actors.

[zenonithus]

cheers beaker. That's pretty much the idea I had of doing it in 3d, by texture mapping a blendshape mesh using 2d morphing photo textures of the actors taken with excact lighting of the scene, then render the mesh over the background footage.

It's a pretty complex shot and I'm not sure if the photo thing will pull off as I intend it to be fairly close up.

does anyone own the old version of the big "Industrial light and magic" book? as I think it has an explination of the kirk scene which I'm sure uses some kind of wireframe mesh in the images. Just curiouse to know their technique all those years ago :)

[jbills]

as already mentioned - from a strictly 2d standpoint, ER is still the best tool for the job, IMHO. It offers more control over correspondance points and the pixels were always buttery smooth, never stretched. Whatever algorigthm they came up with 10 yrs ago is still the best.

You'll find it living in XSI as the warper node (FXTree) - that's the best way to use it, although many people still have an old clunker SGI box around for just this reason.

there's a fairly good breakdown of the 2D method in the "encyclopedia of visual effects" by damian allen, primarily a shake book.

[beaker]

Personally I think the Shake spline warper is nicer then ER. It pretty much took ER and made it better.

[panosik]

What about doing this with AE Spline warper? Any experience with that?

[zenonithus]

hmm, I can't find anything on AE spline warper. any handy tutorials about?

[jbills]

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/zwar_chris/morph/index.html

[zenonithus]

cheers mate :)

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