Building Morphing Effects Using Morph Contexts
Yesterday we showed how to store sets of bezier paths into a Bezier Context action step. And then how to use bezier path keyframe animation to build an animating pencil sketch effect. In today’s post, we’ll slightly modify the PASeq we built for yesterday’s animation effect, and show how you can use bezier path keyframe interpolation to build up a single static artistic image effect rather than an animating movie file. The keyframe movement of the bezier paths combined with some simple recursive image processing work together to build up a single shaded sketch, where the shading is build up from the bezier path movement over time.
If you haven’t read through yesterday’s post, you should do so now. In it we discussed the Bezier Context feature in Studio Artist. Bezier Context action steps let you store one or more sets of bezier paths as keyframes in the Bezier Context. If 2 Bezier Context keyframes are recorded at different frame times, then the bezier paths stored in them will be smoothly interpolated over time in an animation as the current time progresses from the first keyframe to the second.
We built our 2 keyframes by first generating a bezier path sketch of the source image, and then using the bezier warp operation mode to distort the initial bezier sketch to generate our second Bezier Context keyframe. The distorted set of bezier paths was recored at frame time 1, and the bezier path source sketch was recored at frame time 100. We used 2 pencil paint presets to paint in the bezier paths as the last 2 steps in our PASeq. By running the Action : Animate with paint Action Sequence : to Movie menu command, we were able to render out a 100 frame moving pencil sketch animation that smoothly animates from a distorted sketch into the final source sketch over 100 frames.
An alternative thing you can do with keyframed bezier movement (or with any keyframe animated PASeq), is to use it to build up a static output image. The keyframed animation cycles act to build up an image in the canvas over time. So rather than the keyframe animation building successive frames in a movie file, the animation acts to build up a single image through cyclical drawing or processing.
The PASeq below shows off the simple approach I used to build today’s effect. Note that I added one additional action step to yesterday’s PASeq. The second Fixed Color action step below was configured to generate a slight fade to white (2nd gallery image).
