Subject: Re: Character animation: Morphing Ahhh
From: [email-masked]
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 16:45:45 -0500

> 
[snip]
>      My hand bends at the palm..kind like a bonless toon hand..I'm hunting
> for the 'goey' feeling..like the pilsburry dough boy ;)
> 
>    The bend is about 90 degrees and i have three morph targets..Think I'm
> not using enough? I'll post teh results for ya all when I'm finally
> done..I'm hungry..okay perhaps i will not make a clone of the m&m's...I'll
> go for the killer cookie that almost ate my Amiga instead. :)
> 
> Adam Chrystie
> Adam Chrystie [email-masked]
> University Of California at Santa Cruz
> Cinema/Video Major / Senior Status
> 

Adam, in a video project I produced this past semester, I animated
an alien egg pod opening up.  The four flaps had to each undergo about
150 degrees of rotation.  Looking back on it, I should have used bones,
but at the time I had more experience with morph targets.  In the end,
I used nine separate morph targets due to large rotation I was trying
to achieve.  Remember that LW morphs points linearly, so morphs used
to express rotation should have several morph targets, if the rotation
is larger than 30 or 40 degrees, IMHO.  For your application, you might
get better results with four or five morph targets rather than three.  

The flaps I was morphing were thin, though.  (However, not just one
layer of polygons.)  I think the need for several morph targets in
large rotations may apply more to thin objects than fat objects.  Also,
if your character is waving quickly, size fluctuations in the hand
may not be noticeable.  I was amazed at how much detail was lost in 
my animations during the editing process...

Mitch ------------------------------>[email-masked]