Cineversity

Hello…

  I am having a real quandary, and it seems as if there may be no solution.

    I have a need to morph one highly detailed object into another.  In this case, it is an electric guitar that must morph into an acoustic guitar in some manner.  Here is what I have tried so far:

    PBlurp : a 1 trick pony for sure, but it is built for exactly this task.  I went into each model made everything editable, and did a connect/delete, so that I would have at last only 2 objects.  When I created my node, I dragged in the first object fine, then the second object, and I got the beach ball.  I let it ride like that for 10-15 full minutes and finally had to force quit.  Now, there are a lot of ploys in the scene, so I figured it would take some time to calculate, but on a 12-Core Mac Pro with 16 GB of RAM, that 15 minutes felt more like a hang and less like calculation.  It seems that this option is out.

  Using the nitro blast plugin and some trickery.  I thought I could maybe get away with this, but the result I get is not great, difficult to control, and I fear that (based on history) the client is not going to want to see their product exploding into bits, so even pursuing this technique any further could result in a huge waste of time. (same too with PBlurp for that matter)

  I know I have seen some interesting object morphs in commercials and movies and such that don’t involve destruction, and I have to wonder how this is done?  Is doing this sort of thing beyond the limits of C4D?  Or is there some magic I am missing?

  I’m open to any suggestion.

Thanks in advance,
-Will

Hi There,

Not knowing your scene makes is hard to say anything.

Have you tried the camera-deformer? You need then to render two passes, one where object “A” turns into the shape of “B”. (Fading is possible, but two passes and use After Effects then provides the fastest way.Then a second pass where Object “B” turns back from the shape of object “A”.

Morphing is normally done in compositing packages like NUKE. It is pretty much always a distortion and a blend.

All the best

Sassi

Sebastien Florand showed a technique at SIGGRAPH using the collision deformer that offers really nice results. It might not work in your case because the shapes are complex, but I explain the technique in a bit more detail at the 30 minute mark of our August 17 CV Live show. Unfortunately that show hasn’t been migrated to the new site yet, but you can watch it on Livestream.

Hey Guys,

  Sorry it took me awhile to get back over here… I decided to focus on knocking out all of the other scenes in the piece (it’s just over 5 minutes of animation in total).  Side note - this being my first big project with the Physical Render… man it produces some beautiful results… even with the sample quality at medium, it looks really clean. 

  Anyway, I’m essentially back around to this part of the project, while everything else cranks away over at Render King.  When I showed the client a test render I did using a quick-scale / explosion thing I did in part with the Nirto Blast plugin he actually liked it, despite my concerns.  My only real issue is that there are not as many fragments as I would like.  I’m sure there is a way to add some complexity to it in After Effects, but I’d need to hunt down a tutorial for that. 

  Dr Sassi, the camera deformer is actually an interesting idea.  I got pinned into an insane deadline (I deliver on Tuesday), so my ability to try out a new technique is limited… but if I can get this other thing dialed in, I’ll definitely play around with it.

  Rick, the collision deformer is an interesting idea too… I haven’t seen the referenced video yet, but given the issues I’ve already had on poly count dependent techniques, I’m inclined to agree with your hunch.  Still… bookmarked for homework after class.

  Another side note - the site redesign is really nice.  I was thinking it would be really sweet to somehow integrate CV with the contextual help that Cinema has, but that’s another conversation for another day.

Thanks guys,
  - Will

Oh, and I would love to post a scene file or go into more detail about the project to help you help me, but the whole thing is about a product under NDA, so it would be difficult to ‘splain without violating, or at least teetering into a gray area I would just as soon avoid.  But I know you get that