Easy Morph Warping Tutorial

The goal will be to show how weight reduction can be simulated with a warp. In the process, we will discuss several other issues that relate to warps.

Here we have your typical "fat chick"...

Our goal will be to reduce this pristine paradigm of porcine poultry to the svelte lines of a barnyard babe.

Step One:
Setting up the Project

Looking at the Wizard dialog (above) you can see that we have selected Warp as the task to be performed. Once that has been done, press the Next button. Now, the second Wizard dialog will appear, as shown below:

Pressing the Select Start Image button will bring up the Windows Open File Dialog.

Using this dialog in the way that is standard for all Windows programs, navigate to the directory that contains the image you wish to warp and select it by either double-left-clicking on the file name, or left clicking once and then pressing the Open button at the lower right of the dialog.

The image will be loaded (underneath the Wizard dialogs), and you will then be returned to the Wizard, where you should press the Next button.

Now, the third Wizard dialog will appear as shown to the left.

Just press Next, as the defaults taken here still very reasonable, and you can change them at any time you like later on when working with the warp. Note that the values shown here will be different for your project!

Now, the fourth Wizard dialog will appear as shown to the left.

Again, just press Next, as the defaults taken here are still very sensible, and you can change them at any time you like later on when working with the warp. Again, note that the values shown here will be different for your project.

Now, the fifth Wizard dialog will appear as shown to the left.

This dialog controls the total number of frames that will be created if you will be generating an animation from the warp. If you do not plan to generate an animation, but instead are looking for a single warped image as the result of the project, then this setting is not used, and you should leave it set to ten, the default.

If you want to generate an animated sequence, set it to the length you want from five to any number - figure 30 per second, so for two seconds, you could set it to sixty, for instance.

Ten is a good starting value, and again, you can change this at any time later. Press Next now.

As the last Dialog of the Wizard indicates, your project is ready to begin working on.

The line in the dialog that talks about pressing Generate refers to the usual case where the desired goal is to create an animation. For single frames, you'll press One Frame instead.

Press Finish.

Step Two:
Placing the Control Lines

Easy Morph project, no controls placed

Preliminary Discussion

This simply involves a series of left mouse clicks, and one final "terminating" right mouse click.

Don't worry about being too precise in your placement of control lines, because you can adjust the lines once they have been placed. What you should ensure is that your polylines have enough segments to result in smooth contours on your image, because you can't change the number of segments in a polyline once it has been placed; you can only delete it and put down a new polyline with more segments. You'll get a feel for this before too long, but you need to be aware of the issue so you can observe the results.

Your First Polyline

Start image, after 11 left-clicks to place start control half

That is half the job. Now, we need to place the corresponding line in the End Image.

You do not have to use the same number of clicks (line segments) to place the corresponding polyline. In this case, we used about sixteen segments to create the shape that the first polyline is to conform to at the end of the warping process:

Start and End images, after 16 left-clicks to place End control half, and a final right-click to tell Easy Morph that this control pair is complete.

Another Polyline

Start and End images, after 2nd polyline has been placed.

Very Important Interlude:
Save the Project and Restart Easy Morph

To save the project, use Save Project in the File menu, as shown at the right. You will be presented with two save dialogs. The first is for the control elements, which you should call "chick.mpt", and the second is for the project file, which you should call "chick.mpr" Make certain that you include the extension in the filename - Easy Morph does not automatically create extensions for you for reasons that will become clear later.

Now, quit Easy Morph by selecting Exit from the file menu. It is important that you do this! The rest of the tutorial order assumes that this was done. Don't skip this step!

Restart the program, and again using the file menu, select "chick.mpr" from the Most Recently Used file list at the bottom of the File Menu.

Did everything load back in ok? If so, go on to the next step. Otherwise, repeat the previous sections of the tutorial from a fresh start.

Creating a Single Frame of Output

In the case of a warp, usually, the desired frame is the last frame, which completely matches the shape of the controls in the End Image.

To select which frame you want to generate, select Sequence Controls from the Generate menu. The following dialog appears, in which we have highlighted the area where you set the current frame to be the same number as the last frame in the warp:

Current Frame in Sequence Controls Dialog

Once you've done this, remove the checkmark for saving the results, if that item is checked:

Save Results in Sequence Controls Dialog

Finally, select OK in the dialog:

OK in Sequence Controls Dialog

At this point, you can generate the result frame using the One Frame button, and you should get exactly the result you expect. Here's the not-so-fat chick:

Not so fat!

Tweaking your Results

To edit the control line, use the cursor arrow keyboard keys to select the right-hand control. It will become highlighted when it is selected. At that time, press the four-way arrow at the bottom of the toolbox, and all of the control points on the polyline will light up.

Polyline selected for editing

We can now move the polyline by adjusting each of its points, until it is just outside the chick's right edge. But first, we'll drag the image larger so we can more easily edit the points. You can also use the magnify tool for this, by the way.

Enlarged, with Polyline selected for editing

Use the left mouse button to move each point until it is outside the boundary of the image where we want the move to be precise. The end result of that editing is this:

Enlarged, with Polyline edited

...and when you use the One Frame button generate the frame, the result is now:

More precise end result

Now, if you'd like, you can save the single frame result using "Save Result As..." in the File Menu.

This completes the tutorial for single frame warps. You may now continue with the tutorial for an animated warp.

Creating an Animation

Generated Animation in Filmstrip

In order to save the animation, you need to return to the Sequence Controls Dialog, which you'll recall is found under the Generate menu, and turn Save Result on by checking it. Make sure you have a valid path and filename set up in the in the output file entry area, and also that you have the image type you desire selected in the save file as type drop-down.

Now, when you press Generate, Easy Morph will save ten frames (or however many you told it to make) with that filename and a number. Not that the image files are saved during the Generate process; once you turn on the save button as we describe, you need to re-generate the project.

To give a specific example for the file naming conventions, if you choose JPEG as your output format, are set to ten frames and use this as your output name:

c:\images\chik

...then Easy Morph will produce these output files:

c:\images\chik0001.jpg
c:\images\chik0002.jpg
c:\images\chik0003.jpg
c:\images\chik0004.jpg
c:\images\chik0005.jpg
c:\images\chik0006.jpg
c:\images\chik0007.jpg
c:\images\chik0008.jpg
c:\images\chik0009.jpg
c:\images\chik0010.jpg

...which you can then use as a stream of image files in an animation.

You should use a short name of one to four letters (we used "chik"), and you should not use spaces anywhere in the name or in the path (directory) portion of the filename. This ensures that the files created will be 100% compatible with all types of graphics software. Many types of software cannot handle files with spaces in the names, some can't handle files with names over eight characters (and remember, Easy Morph adds a 4-digit number to the name, that's why 4 letters is as long as you want to use!)

One common use is to create animations for the Web; for this use, we highly recommend ULEAD's GIF Animator product, which you can find at http://www.ulead.com/

GIF Animator will load the ten JPEG images and covert them into a Web-friendly GIF animation you can place directly on a web page.

Here is this very project, saved as JPEG as described here, and then run through GIF Animator for the Web:

GIF Animation

That's all there is to this tutorial - we hope you enjoy Easy Morph. If you have questions about this tutorial, or suggestions for details we may have not described well enough for your liking, please send them to us by clicking on the "Mail" button on any of our web pages, or just by clicking here.