Are Combustion Morphs any good?

#1

I worked through a motion morph tutorial yesterday that used the Motion Morph operator to morph stills of a young woman into an old woman. I was blown away by the result! I’ve never used an application that can do this before though so I am wondering how good is the morphing that comes with Combustion (compared with other Combustion plugins if there are any and other applications)? Is it good enough for some of the morphing I have seen in TV advrets and music videos? If not, is there / are there any Combustion plugins that can do it? I know it’s really dated now but could this feature achieve effects simialr to the multi-ethnic faces morphing at the end of Michael Jackson’s Black or White video?

Thanks.

#2

sorry not a true reply but where did you get that tutorial?

#3

There is a video example from Discreet here: http://www2.autodesk.com/streaming/playertable.php?id=177

And a tutorial here: http://bbs.onickz.com/viewtopic.php?t=172

Enjoy.

#4

reflex morph plugin used in combustion is pretty much a full featured warper/morpher. This or similar plugins are avaialble un nearly all the main destop compositing packages. Ie shake, fusion after effects etc…

It is very capable and use for heck of a lot of broadcast work, and largely based on the undisputed king of morphing packages Elastic Reality (no longer commercially available but still widely used ). Flame/Flint/Inferno have a nice warping/morphing toolkit too ! You could definatley recreate the famous old morph sequence… but it is a bit of cliche now days !

I beleive that the morphs in "Black or White’ were done at Pacific Digital later called PDI. The tut you linked shows one of the cardinal mistakes of morphing. Using images that are too dissimilar and warping the backgound as well as the talent, so the reult is pretty ugly and over the top. You should really aim to make a morph a seemless as possible, and not look like a ‘morph’

#5

Some ideas of as to “remake” a similar effect to this?

#6

for a shot like this the 3d is the much more important part. Flame is being used to warp parts of the 3d plate onto the image to make it sit a bit better !

#7

The trail effect is totaly obscure for me,in the “way” of as it was made. The is created in 3D and composite using displaces and warp for example?

#8

Thanks a lot for the information.

Another question: I posted two tutorials. In one he used seperate splines for the Unwarped from and Unwarped To whereas in the second one (the Discreet one) they use the same spline and animate it so Combustion interpolates the points. Is either way better than the other? I suppose if you do it the latter way you know that you have an equal amount of points.

By the way, do you know why I might be getting flickering when I render?

Thanks.

#9

Hi,

DrQuincy, to answer you about:
“Another question: I posted two tutorials. In one he used seperate splines for the Unwarped from and Unwarped To whereas in the second one (the Discreet one) they use the same spline and animate it so Combustion interpolates the points. Is either way better than the other? I suppose if you do it the latter way you know that you have an equal amount of points.”

My version was wrote to train with motion morph, in order to get good bases to use this operator, so people who followed and trained with my tutorial can apply they knowledge to morph an animation using the exact same steps, while applying transform on their splines according to the movement of source and destination images.

The version of Discreet use the “basic” morph, which can be used only to morph still pictures, and which is a quite different process.

#10

Thanks for your reply.

I’ve done a few motion morph test and sometimes it just fades from one image to the other with no morphing. Is this because I’m tweening the splines rather than creating a new one or becaucse I don’t have enough splines?

Thanks.

#11

You have to create one spline for the Source image and another for the Destination ( example, in case of morphing a portrait : for eyes, ears etc ). It works by pairs. Add details to your morph to get rid of fading image by adding other pairs of splines. More splines equals less fading.
In case of motion morph you can tween splines by animating their position and rotation, like you do. But again, remember they All work by pair. One spline for source, one spline for destination.
If you have problems, feel free to PM me in order to find a way to send me your workspace CWS file, even with no footage.

#12

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