Animating with Morpher

Using the Morpher technique within an animation allows the creator to create different versions of the same model, this is helpful for things such as different movements with the same model or facial expressions.


Morpher is done by creating a different number of animations for the same object, again an example of this could be creating an image such as a head, then animating a number of different faces which are then stored and called upon when needed.

The actual process of using the Morpher modifier is a simple one and i will discuss it below as well as display my own attempt.

The first thing that needs to be done is to create the object you want to use the Morpher effect on, once this has been done you must convert the object into an editable poly.

The model i am going to use

Once the image has been converted into an editable poly you will need to make sure there are no modifiers as this will affect the next step, once you have confirmed there are no modifiers you will then need to make a few copies of this object, for this step i created 3 copies of the original, so there were four objects in total.

The three copies of the original head

Once you have the different copies you then need to name each one, preferably the name of the emotion the they are going to be, i for example have named the two heads i use in the example video below, smile and open mouth. Once you have named the objects you can start to animate them, this is actually quite simply to do but to get the face to look like a real emotion you must be quite precise.I am going to describe how i made the Open Mouth objects animation, to start the animation you can simply select the polygons you wish to move, in this case the polygons around the lower lip and the chin, once selected you will need to then pull them down to open the mouth. You will also need to move some of the cheek polygons around to make it look like they are stretched.

Once you have created the animation you want you can then apply the Morpher modifier to the object, when you have done this you should see the "Channel List" in the properties section to the side of Studio Max, within this section you should right click on an empty channel and then click select object from scene and choose the animation you have been working on.

The name of the animation should now be where the empty channel was and there should be a value between 0 and 100, this value is used to control the tween between the different animations. To then capture this animation as a video, you need to use the Auto Key and change the value at the frame you want.

This is my example of going from a smiling face to an open mouth emotion.