Morph Motion

Concept of Morph

Morphing is a special effect in Motion Graphics and animations that morph one image or shape into another through a transition. Morphing is one of the cross-fading techniques which apply to the Motion scene.

Another word for Morphing is twining. It is the process of generating intermediate frames between two images or two frames, which makes it look like a second image is slowly take part in the first image.

It is a George W.Bush(43rd president of the United States) and Arnold Schwarzenegger(American actor, Politician) morph image

We create motion between Text, Logo, Shape through Morphing. After Effect is a platform or tool that can create morph between footage keyframes. Morphing techniques are classified into two parts. They are Mesh-based methods and Feature-based methods. In mesh-based methods, the images are declared by a solid vertex shape. In Feature-based methods, the images are as lines or a set of points. Now-a-days Feature-based methods are popular.

Here is an example of morphing in circle, square and triangle with bounce motion. So it is a simple type of shape morphing in after effect. This is a mesh-based method in morphing. In Mesh-based morphing, first the edge point of all shape path you used are decided. Then make keyframe of all these shape edge path and all key paste in one of our shapes in path keyframe. Set all keyframes to the different time with the same gap, make all keyframes to easy ease. See the same shine on it so apply the Glow Effect on the shape.

How to create Morphing

Here we have created the Morph Effect between two texts. So let’s do this…

Step 1:

Make new after effect project of 1080×1080 px composition.

Step 2:

Write two letters or text that you want to morph.

Step 3:

Then right-click on the text layer and “create shape from text” layer for both.

Step 4:

Now it generates outlines layer in the timeline. Find both outlines path and create a keyframe of it for all letters.

Step 5:

Copy all keyframes one by one in another outline letter path.

Step 6:

Set all keyframes to a different time with the same Time gap.

Step 7:

For a better view of animation movement retouch letters first vertex point. So animation starts at that point of the edge.

Step 8:

Make all keyframes easy ease.

So this is our text morphing…

I have some additional touch on font shadow, reflection, color tone for a better view and smoothness of morphing.

Where we use Morphing

Morphing is used in titles, advertisements, logo animation, story animation. Here I have created animation between google’s logo and google assistant’s logo. Like this, we can implement Morphing on Motion Graphics.