Week 9 - Morpher

In this week's tutorial we had to create an animation using the morpher modifier. This is another technique which provides the answer for another animation problem - that of facial expressions and movements.

Although I played around with the morpher modifier, I have only created a basic animation of a face seemingly eating, just to familiarise myself with the technique. This is because I will not be requiring this technique in my final assignment animation as, firstly I have no people involved in the trailer and therefore will not be needing any human movement and secondly I cannot see a part of my animation where the morpher modifier could in fact be used.

The face model was supplied in the tutorial and to make my animation was very simple. Firstly, I converted the model to an editable poly. I then cloned the model so there was two faces. I renamed the orignal model to "closed mouth" and the cloned model to "open mouth" - just so it was clear when it came to the morphing which model was which.

The next step was to edit the open mouth model. This was simply a case of selecting some of the polygons below the mouth and dragging them downwards in order to open the mouth. Once this was done, I could apply the morpher modifier. The morpher modifier literally morphs one model into the other. Since both models were the same, with the only difference being the mouth, this meant that when the morpher modifier was applied to the closed mouth model, the mouth opened. Once the morpher had been applied to the closed mouth model, I hid the open mouth model.

To capture this opening mouth movement in an animation, I added a keyframe at the beginning and set the value of the open mouth in the morpher modifier to 0. This meant the mouth started closed. On frame 15, I added another keyframe and set the value of the open mouth in the morpher modifier to 100. This meant the mouth was fully open at this point. I repeated this process for every 15 frames up to frame 60, in order to create a 2 second animation of a face seemingly eating.