In article 1991Nov17.023604.19665@dartvax.dartmouth.edu
Of course they were done by the great folks at Pacific Data Images, with a program that I wrote for them. The technique is called morph (actually, the ILM people who first used it in production call it morf), and consists of identifying features in the two animations that should map to one another, and distorting each animation to be the same shape as the other, while cross-dissolving from the first to the second. – Thad Beier
To: ALL Number: 4917 From: WDYE@CSE.UNL.EDU (WILLIAM Refer #: None (ECHO) Date: 11-23-91 11:10 Recvd: No Subj: Re: Michael Jackson Video Conf: 292 Graphics BBS: Rose Media - Hamilton
thad@lever.asd.sgi.com (Thad Beier) writes:
Of course they were done by the great folks at Pacific Data
Images, with a program that I wrote for them. The
technique is called morph…
I don't suppose there's a public-domain version of the morph algorithm, is there?
To: ALL Number: 4919 From: JBM@EOS.ARC.NASA.GOV (JEF Refer #: None (ECHO) Date: 11-23-91 15:10 Recvd: No Subj: Re: Michael Jackson Video Conf: 292 Graphics BBS: Rose Media - Hamilton
thad@lever.asd.sgi.com (Thad Beier) writes:
Of course they were done by the great folks at Pacific Data
Images, with a program that I wrote for them. The
technique is called morph (actually, the ILM people who
first used it in production call it morf), and consists of
identifying features in the two animations that should
^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^
map to one another,
^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^
and distorting each animation to
be the same shape as the other, while cross-dissolving
from the first to the second.
This feature matching business seems like the trickiest part; is that done by a human operator, or by an automatic process?
–
Jeff Mulligan (jbm@eos.arc.nasa.gov)
NASA/Ames Research Ctr., Mail Stop 262-2, Moffett Field CA, 94035
(415) 604-3745
To: ALL Number: 4920 From: PETER@CUNIXF.CC.COLUMBIA. Refer #: None (ECHO) Date: 11-23-91 15:10 Recvd: No Subj: Re: Michael Jackson Video Conf: 292 Graphics BBS: Rose Media - Hamilton
In article 1991Nov18.215359.9190@unlinfo.unl.edu wdye@cse.unl.edu (William Dy:
thad@lever.asd.sgi.com (Thad Beier) writes:
Of course they were done by the great folks at Pacific Data
Images, with a program that I wrote for them. The
technique is called morph…
I don't suppose there's a public-domain version of the morph
algorithm, is there?
I haven't seen the Michael Jackson video but I think this morph algorithm also goes by the name of 2-pass mesh warping .. at least that's how it's described in the book that I have. There is source code for this alg. in the book. starting on p.222.
The book's name is Digital Image Warping by George Wolberg, IEEE computer society press monograph, isbn 0-8186-8944-7.
I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet, and it's doubtful that I will this semester (I'm taking a course taught by the author). Well, I'm sure if I'm wrong about the 2-pass mesh warping stuff, someone will correct me. :)
PQ?
Pedro Quien? peter@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu Peter K. Wu
To: ALL Number: 4923 From: SIMON@IVEM.UUCP (SIMON LE Refer #: None (ECHO) Date: 11-23-91 15:10 Recvd: No Subj: Re: Michael Jackson Video Conf: 292 Graphics BBS: Rose Media - Hamilton
In article 1991Nov18.215359.9190@unlinfo.unl.edu wdye@cse.unl.edu (William Dy:
I don't suppose there's a public-domain version of the morph
algorithm, is there?
I don't know if there are any PD programs to do morphing, but my co-worker and I worked for about an hour entering relative data points of our digitized faces into the Iris here at work. He wrote a little program to take our digitized faces and map them onto a 2 dimentional plane. Taking those points that relate (where we wanted to look like it's stretching and shrinking from me to him), he moved them from my face's detail points to his. At the same time he's blending the two images, fading from me to him. With around 95 relating points entered (which took a long time to match, but still wasn't enough, I think), there were 181 triangle meshes created. But the effect is pretty funny, but real looking, almost. I want to work on it more, but the point is, it only took him 30 minutes to write the program to do this. (It cost the guys who made the video 8 million? We're up for hire :) To tell you the truth, the actual rendering was done with another program he's written called SYNU, which is a PD rendering package available from the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Synu is a rendering "language" almost. It's full of functions that are used by the programmer to create images from scene files. I'm not too sure how it works, but it worked great on the morphing ;)
-Simon
–
* Simon Lee * Microscopy and Imaging Resources *
To: ALL Number: 4930 From: THAD@LEVER.ASD.SGI.COM (T Refer #: None (ECHO) Date: 11-23-91 15:10 Recvd: No Subj: Re: Michael Jackson Video Conf: 292 Graphics BBS: Rose Media - Hamilton
In article 1991Nov19.165115.27090@network.ucsd.edu, simon@ivem.uucp (Simon Le: … interesting description of good first morph program deleted…
It is true that the morph programs are not all that complex. I wrote the basic part of the one that PDI uses in a couple of days, and added a reasonably nice interface, animation, and optimizations in another couple of weeks.
The whole Michael Jackson video had a budget of $7-8 million, the morph scenes were a tiny fraction of that (< 5%). It is important to realize that the expensive part of computer graphic production is not writing the programs, but doing the actual animation. There was over 8 animator-weeks spent doing the keyframes for the Michael Jackson video. That's a lot of work.
As a completely non-impartial observer of the animation, I find it staggeringly good. I saw it again last night, and could not believe how good it was. I know what the program can do and what it can't do…it was just incredibly skilled work by the animators that made that piece look good.
– Thad Beier What is good, and what is not good, need we ask anybody
to tell us these things?
To: ALL Number: 4951 From: SIMON@IVEM.UCSD.EDU (SIMO Refer #: None (ECHO) Date: 11-24-91 03:10 Recvd: No Subj: Re: Michael Jackson Video Conf: 292 Graphics BBS: Rose Media - Hamilton
My last posting on the morphing referenced a program called SYNU. I stated it was a Public Domain program, but from I've learned it is NOT Public Domain, nor is it available to just anyone. It is, however, open to the scientific community. If you have any questions about this, please contact the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
-Simon
–
* Simon Lee * Microscopy and Imaging Resources *