Insert Morph Cycle

Inserts Morph Cycles into the Animator at the location of the 3D Cursor.

 

A Morph Cycle is composed of a set of models that are manipulated as a single entity. It is useful when the repeated use of a sequence of several morphs are used in an animation. For example, a simple walking figure can be made by using 4 key costumes which are repeated on an 18-frame cycle as the morphing model follows a path. (Note that in many cases the use of a Robot is a better procedure to simulate walking and animated figures).

A Morph sequence file (with extension .ANI) will be requested when creating a costume timeline for a Morph Actor. A further prompt will ask for the number of times the animated sequence is to repeat during the animation. The sequence of timeline time slots will then be adjusted so that the Morphs fit their action into the time allotted. A morph sequence file is written from a command on the keyframer menu.

To understand the use of a morph cycle consider the following example:

A walking sequence is constructed with four models of a walking figure that form a cycle every 18 frames, the first model in the sequence is repeated in frame 18 `to close the loop'.

In the keyframer (snapshot shown below) the basic "walk" Actor has 5 costume timelines and morphs between the scene files in order:

 

Frame

Actor "walk's" Costumes

1

step1.mfx

6

step2.mfx

10

step3.mfx

14

step4.mfx

18

step1.mfx (again) to complete a repeating cycle)

 

 

Suppose now you want to build an animation where the figure walks along a path for 150 frames. It would be very tiresome to have to enter a very large number of keyframes every 4 or 5 frames. This is where the Morph Cycle comes in. We can use our simple 18 frame animation to create a Morph cycle file representing the Actor "walk".

The first thing that we must do is save the basic morph sequence to a file by selecting the "Save As Morph" option from the "walk" Actors pop up menu:

With this information recorded the sequence of images can be reused over and over again. When it is inserted in an animation it can be repeated and scaled to fill any available time slot. Considering again our 150 frame animation we can insert the morph cycle so the 18 frame sequence is repeated 8 times - and all with one simple insert command!

Note that an 18 frame sequence does not repeat exactly an even number of times in 150 frames (it is in fact 8.3333), when the morph sequence is inserted it will be automatically scaled to best fit the available time. If we had wanted to be rather obscure we could have chosen to insert only one copy of the morph cycle giving key frames at 1,48,80,112,and 150 (a very slow motion walk indeed!)

If we had chosen to insert one cycle of the saved "walker" morph in an animation of 30 frames then the keyframes would be located during frames 1,9,16,23, and 30 and the walker would appear to move at half the speed of the basic morph, (Morph1 below), if we had chosen to insert two cycles then the walker would move at approximately the same speed as the basic morph, since 30 frame is about twice the length of the 18 frame morph sequence, (Morph2 below).