Morph tool

Flame Tools and Tech
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Is there a morph/warp tool that I am missing?

Talking about classic gridwarp/splinewarp tools, i did a job and between nuke and flame there are lots of bugs in both tools in doing those morphs/warps,

Nukes splinewarp just corrupts itself frequently, you want to delete a keyframe? good luck bro.

Flames distort tool is also hella tricky/buggy from what my flame guy tells me, so I wonder if I ever tackle this stuff next time… is there a better tool? For faces I will definetely go the 3D route with texture projected on 3D heads with blendshapes, maybe thats generally the way to go, as tedious as it is its something thats a known quantity, i know how long modelling and posing a head will take, i dont know how many hours one will loose due to bugs and jankyness.

any tips on other tools that just rule at this stuff?

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Deform mesh is the best warping tool in Flame. I use it with UVs to do morphs.

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I found out several tips in the Distort node for this last project:

  • Do the facial features from inside out. Eyes, nose, eye brows, lips/mouth, then face outline.
  • Once you do the face outline don’t go back into the face to add more features. It will bug the hell out.
  • Adding open splines around the face is OK.
  • In the transparency channel go to 99.999 and not to 100. This will keep your render out of your UI.
  • Once you’re (almost) happy with your morph, feed a UV map to your distort node, render out distort for A and B plates and then use them as UV maps to distort your layers in Action.
  • Prepare clean bg plates for both and dissolve them, preferably with different layers with different timings.
  • You WILL have to paint a lot of stuff so have everything in layers.
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Or get hold of Elastic Reality. :rofl:

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5

Show N Tell please… I just can’t imagine grid based is easier than free form splines.

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One thing to watch out for if you’re using UVs is the distort node only works in 16-bit so you might run into an issue of a steppy image. I’m using it heavily on a current project and wanted to use this trick but sadly ran into this exact issue.

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funny enough I do the same thing in nuke where I bake my morphs to UVs (STmaps) so I can do the fading from a to B with seperate nodes in “realtime”

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I would also love to see the deform mesh perform. It is a node that seems to have passed me by.

I always say, when this topic comes up, that a bug in deform/morph forced me into extended bicubics and nothing else.

A rather excellent FXphd master class Flame Masters II expands on morphing between two extended bicubic meshes using an expression.

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9

I avoided the distort node for so long, but as @ALan alluded to above, there came a point where I was like, dang, these grids are killing me, I just want some splines and I use distort fairly often now (with the caveat that I ALWAYS duplicate it before making substantial changes and save a lot while using it). Some (not all) tasks are just exponentially faster, more flexible, and more accurate to do with bespoke splines than subdivided grids. And in those cases, I just accept the bugs and try to cover myself as much as possible.

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I want to learn more about the different deform tools.

Anyone interested in doing a demo?

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I can do a breakdown of a recent job with the distort node, if I can get approval from the producers. And maybe do it live with you answering questions on the point. Maybe it could be a hosted here @andy ?

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