Morphing Animations

Morphing is the process of transforming two images where it seems like the the first melts, dissolves and rearranges itself to become the second. BitMorph is a free morphing program which takes two images and creates a sequence of images showing them morphing.

My animation started with five images which had been enhanced with an assortment of filters and saved as separate files. Two at a time were then loaded into BitMorph and the morph sequences generated. These sequences were then moved to Animation Shop (which comes with Paint Shop Pro) to create the animation.

While this tutorial is not meant to provide basic instructions on using BitMorph or AS, it does show how to use them together to create an interesting animation. Note that the AS screen shots are from version 1 of AS.

This tutorial requires:

BitMorph 3.0
Animation Shop

UPDATE: BitMorph apparently is no longer being supported by its developer. The link above was found by using Google to search for BitMorph. It this one disappears, do the same. Other morphing programs are available such as MorphMan although it isn't free.

1) Create two equal sized bitmaps (BitMorph only reads bitmaps) in PSP or other paint program. Because the final product will be an animated gif file, reduce the number of colors in the images to 256.
2) Start BitMorph and load both images.
3) Create a vector between two points in the first image. Then, create a corresponding vector in the second image. Add more vectors. The more vectors, the more parts of the images move.
4) After adding all the vectors you want, click the Morph button to generate the sequence.
5) For my examples, the default 5 frames was used. Add more for smoother transitions.
6) After the sequence is created, select Save Sequence Images from the Sequence menu and save each frame as a separate file.
7) Start Animation Shop and create a new file. Because BitMorph only creates the intermediate images, load Image 1 and 2.
8) Insert morph sequence between them.
9) Finish the animation.	a) 1/10 second is too fast a display time for each frame. Set the first and last frames to 100 and set the other images to 35. This will allow you to view the "normal" images before they change. b) So that the animation circles around from the kite back to spring, create a new morph sequence with the kite as the first image and spring as the second. Insert it after the last image and set these images display times to 35. c) Save it. The result can be seen at the top of this page..

The way the morph will "operate" depends on how you select where the vectors are placed in each image. If they cross over the image and are in different parts of each image (e.g., image 1 - lower left to upper middle, image 2 - upper right to lower left) such as was used above, you get an explosive or twisting morph. If the vectors are in similar parts of each image and don't cross over, you get a more smooth transition. If you have it loop back to the beginning, you can get an oscillating effect.