Can you turn a frog into a Prince?

Sure you can! Just wave a magic wand over the frog (or scare it with a mouse?)
 

The rollover above consists of a picture of a frog, plus an .AVI movie file. When you put the mouse over the picture, the movie starts running. This is not just any old .AVI file, but a special type called a MORPH.  A morph is an animation that changes one picture smoothly to another picture - it doesn't just flash from one to the other, but instead it looks like the image is "melting" or "transforming." Making a morph isn't so hard, as long as you have a good tool,  like UMORPH Studio. Install this from the Y:\ drive (at FIS only), by clicking on this link:

Making a Morph

1. Run UMORPH studio.
    
2. Choose two pictures - a start image and an end image. Load these by clicking on the two empty image boxes.
    
3. Now comes the hard part.  You must match up points between the two images.  For example, the frogs eyes should be matched up with the prince's eyes.  The best tool is the LINE tool (red line).
   You must click to set the two endpoints in one picture. Then go to the other picture and move the endpoints to a matching feature on that picture.  Then make another line, reposition, etc.
    
4. After you have matched up points, click on the MORPH menu
   and choose "Save Morph Video".

Making it Smoother

In the example above, the two pictures are significantly different, with the frog rotated 45% from the front.  So it is kind of tough to match up the features.  The result is a morph like the one above -
it "tears" as it changes.

To make a "smoother" morph, you will want to choose two images that are basically similar - for example, a person's face and a lion's head.  Or a whole person standing up and another person standing up.
You might use a person sitting down and a person standing up, but make sure the features can easily be matched up.

Assignment

(1)  Make a morph using 2 faces. Be sure to SAVE the project (that's the dots) as well as the MOVIE (.avi)

(2) Make a morph using two images that are similar in shape, but contain two substantially different objects.  For example, a CAR and a TIGER, or a BUILDING and a PERSON (standing), or SWORDS and PLOWSHARES, etc.  

They must have SOME similarities - e.g. a car has 4 wheels on the ground and a tiger has 4 feet on the ground - but don't choose two things that are extremely similar, like a car and a truck. Make a morph.
Be sure to use lots of points so the transition is s..m..o..t..h....

(3) SHOW your morphs to the teacher - he may have suggestions about how to make them better.

(4) Take a picture of yourself (use a digital camera) and morph YOUR face to something else -
a movie star, an animal, whatever you find interesting.  I will work better if the target picture is roughtly the same shape, so morphing your face into a bicycle might not work as well as morphing your face into a pumpkin.

== HINTS ==

You must use enough points so it is not simply "fading" from one image to the other -
e.g. not like the one below.It was made with NO matching points:

Make sure the points are consistent, matching up similar features correctly,
other wise the image will "tear", like this one:

• Use lots of points, not just a couple

• Make sure the points are consistent - e.g. a line from left-to-right
  is also from left-to-right on the other image
   
• To make the movie smoother, click [Options] when you "Save AVI file",
  and increase the number of frames per second (perhaps 25 instead of 15)
   
• To avoid "pixelization", use No Compression.
   
• SAVE your project before quitting - this makes a file containing the positions
  of all the points.  Otherwise, you must create them again later.

Now read about how to put MORPH MOVIES into a Web-page,
and see what your ASSIGNMENT is.