Research Project:  Object Metamorphosis and Transformations

Fani Vassiadi

MA Digital Effects

NCCA, Bournemouth University

As soon as I started looking into metamorphosis and transformations, I tried to find a concept story that would  help me understand these techniques much better. Because we are using Houdini and Shake software for the  Effects course, I did all the 3D in Houdini and then work with the 2D elements in Shake. From the beginning of the research I was interested in non-organic morphing and therefore I thought of creating a metamorphosis sequence between chairs.

To be more precise, in the video I describe my daily schedule just by showing chairs. It was a very interesting project, as I learned about transforming objects, rotoshaping, 2D morphing and how to combine several layers. Doing a research and development on the furniture that I used was very important, as well as having referenced pictures. Modeling, animation, lighting and rendering was done in Houdini. At this stage almost everything worked well, I only had to think how each chair would transform in order to morph easily into another.

When I started to work in Shake, many difficulties appeared. Shake's Morphing Tools have line/shapes for creating warping and morph effects. Even though this gives you a good control by drawing the areas you want to change, it is becoming difficult when trying to isolate specific areas. For instance, in the first shot I had to morph a box into a “breakfast” chair. Having two completely different shapes made the whole process even more difficult. Although, Shake provides boundary lines, I did not found them very useful because my goal was to isolate completely some areas. Boundary lines only tend to eliminate the morphing effect in the areas that you apply them. So, I tried to approach the whole effect a bit differently. I started by using rotoshapes in order to split the 2D image into many pieces, then I did the morphing and composite them together for the final result. Consequently, in the first shot I used 6 rotoshapes for each 2D image. I tried to use the same number of points in the shape I drawn for both images. When sometimes I tried to create something really detailed, adding too many points, strange artefacts appeared in the render. So, using too little points is as bad as using too many. What is more, if using many points in the shape that we create, the software makes more calculations and the whole procedure becomes suddenly very slow. For that reason, pre-tests were required in order to specify the number of points as well as the corresponding one's. As we mentioned in the theory, the corresponding points make the whole difference in morphing.

Research Project Concept Video: Click here to open the video 

(in case the video does not open please go at "WebGraphics" directory it is called ResearchVideo.mpeg2)