Talk:Morphing

Starting to Degrade

This article is dropping quickly in its accuracy and objectivity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pkivolowitz (talk • contribs) 04:06, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Yeah. For example, Morphing in the future does not actually deal with the future ... JöG (talk) 23:46, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

And it doesn't say when "today" is, doesn't name examples for the TV shows hinted at and the sentence "In years past, effects were obvious, which led to their overuse" doesn't even make sense to me. --Mudd1 (talk) 06:56, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Name

Wasn't this process originally called "morfing" with an 'f'?

I hope not, because it derives from the Greek root morph-, meaning shape or form. --Adoniscik (talk) 18:47, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

An HTML version of the defining 1992 paper is available online (or see doi:10.1145/142920.134003); it states

We use the term "morphing" to describe the combination of generalized image warping with a cross-dissolve between image elements. The term is derived from "image metamorphosis" …

And why the heck is this reference not in the article? (See also this extensive bibliography of related work.) --KSmrq^T 20:09, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

PK Here - why would you call the B&N paper "defining"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.133.224.14 (talk) 18:46, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, according to the Making Of Willow in the very beginning the special effects team (e.g. Doug Smythe and Dennis Muren) indeed spelled it "morf", knowingly that it should be "morph". Considering that people might see this as a blunder they soon changed it to the conventional "morph". However, since the original spelling was used only for a very brief period of time, I see no reason to included this into the article. Robinandroid (talk) 14:34, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

older techniques

Is it appropriate to refer to the old cross-fading techniques or older transformation animations as "morphing"? I was under the impression that the name "morph" was hung specifically on the technology such as that of TERMINATOR 2 which involved computer interpolation. I realize that a rather HUGE amount of bastardization has set upon the term since then (nowadays people use it as a simple synonym for "change") but was this not the inception of the term in SFX? Which is to say, people did not describe Lon Chaney's werewolf transformation as a "morph" back when it was made, did they? (Or did they?) 24.33.28.52 21:06, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Lon Chaney's werewolf transformation would have been called a "matched dissolve". Morphing is a matched dissolved coupled with two image warps. I believe Doug Smythe used the term morphing in his original work on Willow and ILM. In my own research, I found the earliest use of morphing like technology was at AT&T Bell Labs for undistorting satellite and telescope images (inverse warp matching the defects in the lens). This work was done in the early 60s but was "warping" only - no dissolves were used which would have made them true morphs.

I was at SIGGRAPH 1980, when Jim Blinn discussed the use of computer generated 'inbetweening' at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a morphing context. My recollection was that he had demonstrated the technique to morph one image into another. He was using it at JPL in generating computer animations of spacecraft for simulations and those pretty 'demo' videos of what the spacecraft were going to be doing. The company I was in in 1984 used similar (well-known in the field) techniques, using control points to transform geospatial data from aerial photos and other sources to match up with topographic maps. However that was a one-step process.--Gar37bic (talk) 22:42, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

PK here - Yes Blinn talked about what would today be called "image based rendering," in essence some warping.

Bell Labs did image warping in the 1960's to correct lens defects in early satellite-based cameras. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.133.224.14 (talk) 18:44, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Speaking of older techniques, there are also things like the pirouette at the end of the audition montage in All That Jazz, which is just achieved using cuts (and of course careful blocking, camera placement and so on). It's surely not a morph in technical terms, but it achieves an effect which is similar to the "Cry" video's, and even more similar to the "Black or White" morph. (Perhaps that wasn't even a coincidence, especially since Michael Jackson was a pretty big Bob Fosse fan.) RW Dutton (talk) 23:34, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Examples

where can I watch an example of this? --Jeevies 19:03, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

See an example at: http://www.jkcinema.com//cgi-bin/12162002173539Chavstro.swf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.233.39.1 (talk) 22:17, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to guess that that was meant as an attack on Chavez, but I like it anyway. :) Anyway, the three Bush-Schwarzenegger frames don't seem like a very good example to me. The middle one hardly looks like Arnold at all - hardly a good demonstration of the technique. --MQDuck 21:34, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I do see the resemblance , though an animated gif (or png or even embedded <video> ) would be better IMO --TiagoTiago (talk) 09:50, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

What about the morphing done with 3D ?

Shouldn't there be some mention of how somtimes they (re)create the 3d shape of the 2 targets and do the morphing with 3d CGI? --TiagoTiago (talk) 09:56, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

I think this should be mentioned too. Star Trek IV had CGI morphing heads of the main cast, probably before any other film. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.1.143.175 (talk) 21:31, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Very Early (1969) Example of Morphing by Computer, May be of Interest

The little booklet "Physionomie, psyche en chironomie" written by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, Reind van\ de\ Riet, and Aad van\ Wijngaarden, and published by the Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, on Oct. 4, 1969, contains a very early example of morphing. The first 3 pages give a derivation of a morphing algorithm, presented jokingly as the "diffusion of physionomy and psyche", controlling the morphing action with a variable called $\chi$. It is the applied in the next 25 pages to the morphing of the portrait of the parting curator and geometrical algebra expert Prof. J.A. Schouten into the symbol for the Lie derivative $ \math L \over v $, which was fundamental to his work. The intermediate steps are produced on a line printer.

Dick Grune, dick@cs.vu.nl 80.101.155.12 (talk) 20:13, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Bush-Arnie-morph.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:07, 10 May 2020 (UTC)