Week III - Fun with Morpher

Migraines are terrible things. Worst ones are those that aren't cured by numerous cups of tea. Those ones are just harsh and use cheat-codes. Had an interesting conversaiton the other day about that... what if life was a giant computer game? You can use cheat codes to suddenly change things or make yourself invincible and such. Or perhaps we can occasionally crash it and cause glitches... your arms are suddenly on the other side of the room; or you keep walking but not moving. I digress... as they always say: "The game of life sucks; but the graphics rule"

Onto animation... which I was quickly tutored on by Lee and Tom; to help catch up. It didn't help that I was told this little tool was called Morphin', Morphen and Morphing... when the term is 'Morpher'... but nonetheless the lad's help was greatly appreciated.

So yes; Morpher... the older brother of the red cartoon plastacine guy from our childhood (Those were the days)

Luckily; using the Morpher is quite easy. It requires a bit of preparation; but can be useful if something needs to... well... morph. Here's the gist of it: You create an 'original'; the one to be morphed and shape-shifted. What you can do then is create a clone of it. You can then tweak the clone into another position. Using the 'morpher' tool; you link the original and clone together. What happens then is that you can control how much the original 'becomes' the clone; using the 0-100% slider on the side. The demonstration I was given was 3 cylinders... allow me to explain:

Upon creating the first cylinder; you clone it and create 2 others. The other 2 are different colours just to make the example clearer. So we tweak the other 2 to have slanted edges; like so. The original is then linked to them with the 'morpher' tool. The little list on the right of the image are the 'channels' to what it connects to. Thus; the purple tube is linked to both the rouge tube, and the kingfisher one. What I can then do; is tell the Purple tube how much it becomes either of the 2 other tubes. If I set the rouge to 100%; it will fully become like the rouge tube (Thus; jut out at the top). If, on the other hand; I set the kingfisher tube to 50%; the purple tube will become a half-way position between itself and the kingfisher one... with me?

Several little tweaks along the timeline lead to this. As you can see... you can morph an original into several different shapes simultaneously. At some points; the purple tube both stretches out at the top and the bottom: Taking aspects of both the Rouge and KingFisher tubes.