Facial Morphing & Animation Using the Free Software - MorphX

I stumbled across this nifty little freeware the other week and finally got around to giving it a try. For those of you who haven't tried morphing software before, the basic concept is to create a before and after photo, and tell the software to morph or tween between the two to make them seamlessly transform.

For this little demo, I took a couple webcam shots with some interesting effects and plopped those down for the before and after shots. I took care to try and keep my head in relatively the same position between the shots. This would likely make the transitions that much more believable.

I took a screenshot of the process of setting up the morph below. You'll notice there is a dotted bright green (and blue where selected) line hovering over my face. The idea is to click near key features on the before image. Once complete, pressing enter would carry over that same line pattern to the after image. From here you would simply adjust the vertices as necessary to maintain the key point landmark positions.



There's a built in preview feature to help you make sure your morphing sequence is looking good. Once you're happy, you can either render the image sequence to several files or you can choose to render to movie (quicktime). In my case, I rendered to quicktime and then took the movie into iMovie to further play with it, including your basic title screens as well as frame reversal effects and slow-motion :)



A really cool way of extending my example would be to daisy chain several facial morphs back to back. You could for example take photos from your entire life and morph from one to the next chronologically, showing gradual age progression! The possibilities are abundant and the software is free, so have fun!