Hi all,
If I have two completely different models, say a human and an ogre in Unity, how would I go about making a smooth looking “morphing” animation between the two? I’m mostly interested in the simplest solution to this answer (I’m least interested in having to muck around in Maya or 3DS). There are some mesh deformation systems like MegaFiers available but as far as I know they don’t have this feature.
The only way that comes to my mind is setting up the second model’s data in the vertex attributes of the first one and then pass it to a shader that would interpolate between those two values. But this has two major problems: Both models must obviously have the same amount of vertices. Also, combining that data manually probably would be time consuming and inaccurate. Perhaps search around for a software that can do that?
I don’t think there is a simple solution to your question mainly because:
1: Two different meshes will have 2 different vertex number (Order). How do you expect the 3D software to know, which vertex have to go, where, to make the transition?
2: Unity at the moment does not support morphs or blendShapes, so even if you have the same vertex order, you still can’t just make a blendShape \ moprh and slide it in Unity to make transition.
Sometimes the solution is not simple…
Only thing that comes to my mind, is to import both models in zBrush and then transfer the details from the one to the other (zTransfer or whatever it was called), then you will have 2 different meshes with the saame vertex order. From there you can find some plug-ins for blendShapes, or just add bones and bake the morph transition to bones…
The absolute simplest is to give them each a transparent shader and fade one in while fading the other out. Maybe also smooth the mainTextureColor. If the Ogre is taller or wider, also gradually change the scale. Make a big, very faint “swirly” particle effect over the whole thing.
Not technically a morph, but it should look kind of cool, get the idea across, and, as other answers pointed out, be a whole lot easier than a “real” morph.