#All
You got me pegged. I was the one taking a rest in the Xaos demonstrator's
chair <g>.
For text I never bother with morphing on the object level, I morph on the image
level using a 2D morph package. You'd be surprised how much 3D looking
morphing is done that way. I don't morph much of anything, though, I find it a
royal pain in the ***, and not usually worth the trouble (though it can be a
great effect sometimes). For character stuff, I've seen plenty of models that
were created so well the seams were virtually un-noticeable, proving that
morphs can be avoided for all but the most close up scenes. And skin.axp or
spline based packages can take care of that just fine, too.
There are a few ways morphing between dissimilar objects can be acheived, and
while I'm not real familiar with how they work, I think I've got an inkling of
two methods. As a matter of fact, there are a couple of packages out now that
allow you to morph between objects with dissimilar vertex counts and
orientations.
One way is to sort of turn both objects to "dust" and build one from the other
from scratch (I don't know if it's a particle system, but I imagine that would
be one way to do it).
Another way is to intelligently analyze (I know that's a vague statement, but
I'm not familiar with specifics of algorithms that can acheive this sort of
thing) the two objects and interpolate "tween" objects for the morph. I guess
this would be the more difficult of the two to implement, but I know it can be
done. There are some sophisticated polygonal reduction routines (I think the
Yost group plans on releasing a couple) that do something like this, and I'm
sure it's not too much of a stretch to apply it to multiple objects and morphs.
As I said, there's a group or two out there that are working on this for IPAS3.
The way I see it is there are varying levels of "intelligence" in effects
routines, and the more intelligent the routine the less the operator has to set
the objects up before pressing the button, he just has to "tell" the routine
what he wants and it'll figure it out. Considering how braindead I can be
sometimes, I vote for people developing "smart" routines that take advantage of
todays powerful software and hardware.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)