CompuServe Thread

>> ThanX for the response…however I may not of explained myself enough? Try this..we want to morph from say a letter "A" to a letter "B". << Garry, before you knock yourself out trying to pull this off, I just want to say that morphing is not going to work. It's not a matter of matching the vertices, there are also the faces to worry about. The faces that are used for an "A" are not going to work for a "B" even if the vertices are the same. Consider the steps need to make an "A" into a "B". Now there are many ways to do this, but what comes to mind immediately is the left side of the A going vertical, the top right of the "A" bows out, and the bottom right leg of the "A" bends and curves into to form the bottom loop of the "B". You're not going to get that to happen with morphing. Experiment with animating cross sections with Yost Skin or even Tuber2. Metareyes might also give the effect you want. I once did a morphing sequence of S->L->E->M->K. After failing miserably using the shaper, I hand constructed the geometry. I still used morphing, only I hand constructed a lot of the intermediate shapes. The M->K sequence involved making the letters out of cube primatives and moving them around in the keyframer. I actually did the L->E in reverse, because it was easier to make the vertical bars of the E shrink into the L. Think about the intermediate steps it takes to go from one letter to another and animate those, don't waste your time trying to make vertex counts match in the shaper. -Grant Blaha [ADESK]

Mistakes in my book! Impossible! Yes, an old edition (a very old edition!) had a mistake in the formula. I actually ended up taking that exercise out completely because it's really not the best way to morph. I meant, look at the exercise where create 2D shapes of numbers with the same number and orientation of vertices. Loft them with Optimization off, with always the same path, same steps etc. This creates decent morphable numbers. I found it actually worked best when I created an intermediate shape for each morph, eg. an intermediate 2D shape between the 1 and the 2, the 2 and the 3, etc. This avoided all the funny business that happens when you morph to a dissimilar shape. You can probably get Susan to send you the newest ones, but I don't think that exercise has changed much from one edition to the next. So put that in your pipe and smoke it 🙂 Michele PS. I'll be down in a month or so to walk you through the exercise if you still can't get it. (Oh boy I am really being obnoxious today) PPS. How is the cute little on these days?