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Somebody at Stanford has done research into the word 'morph'. It came into widespread use with the debut of Michael Jackson's Black or White video of 1991. I wrote the software for that video at PDI (Pacific Data Images) in 1990, and presented it at Siggraph in 1992.

Interestingly, ILM was pushing hard for the alternative 'morf' spelling, and we spent considerable effort seeding our preferred 'morph' spelling into the trade press. Fortunately for us, we were working on music videos and television commercials that showed off the technique well, and ILM only used their tool for a few shots in a few movies.

I think that Black or White is still the most impressive morph ever done -- probably because we spent about six person-months refining it. Jamie Dixon and Amie Slate did the bulk of the work for that video.

Thad Beier

At PDI, we did some of the very early, but not the earliest, morph animation. The earliest developers/users were Tom Brigham at NYIT and Doug Smythe at ILM.

One thing we did, though, as our tool was used over and over again back in '90 and '91 was to push the use of the word 'morph'. We were working on things like the Michael Jackson Black or White video, things that really pushed the technique into many people's eyeballs. ILM was pushing the word 'morf'.

A Stanford student did a survey of the use of the word 'morph' in the news media, and it exploded from almost unused to being used in thousands of articles over the period that we were striving to push the word out, and as we were doing those videos. It was fun to coin a word, and have it become accepted.

thad

Our Visual Computing class recently had to do our own morph software using the Beier-Neely Feature Based Metamorphosis Algorithm. It wasn't too difficult (well, we never went as far as Ghost-Busting sub-section of 3.3). Another cleaner copy of the algorithm can be found here.
Maybe you could implement the algorithm, and then run it on the original picture, plus a reduced size image of the subject with all the lines in the second picture proportionately smaller. Your in between morphs should have the look you desire (unless i'm reading your request wrong). Implementation of anti-aliasing using supersampling with a gaussian convolve before cross-dissolving does help!

I was working on a movie, trying to do procedural animation in Alias Power Animator (the rediculously inferior predecessor to Maya) and decided that I could write my own animation system faster than I could get the animation done in PA. So I did.

The z animation system is designed for a particular class of animation common to visual effects, animation where a procedural description (that is, a script or a program) is the best way to do describe the animation. This is distinctly different from "character animation", but we are an FX house and not an animation house.

I chose to use a real programming language as the scripting language. I think that this is extremely important; for a number of reasons -- but the most important two in my experience is that every animation-language I've used has been terrible (slow, buggy, limiting, hard to debug, and slow); and standard languages have great IDEs, debuggers, compilers, and are instantly portable to a wide class of machines. I used C, and have been extremely happy with that choice.

Now, one might complain that C is a programming language and not a scripting language; and that it's hard to learn. I don't feel that there is a difference between scripting and programming -- and C is really quite an easy language to learn, there are great books, good courses, and a tremendous amount of code out there to learn from.

We use Pixar's RenderMan as our offline renderer, and use OpenGL as the real-time interactive renderer. These are really pretty similar in many ways, and with the combination of the C language, RenderMan, and OpenGL, the animation system is just glue holding these together; along with some spreadsheet and curve-editing libraries I already had lying around.

We've been moderately successful. About 1/3 of the FX you saw in X-Men were done in z, as were the FX you didn't see in Blue Crush (you didn't see them because our animators did such a good job.) We've worked on some 40 other movies over the last five years, and while we have Maya we haven't felt the need to use it except in some very character-animation-like instances.

One nice thing about the system that you are talking about is that you can do some core functionality pretty quickly, I would think, and then you can just add stuff as time goes on. Get polygons and spline surfaces working, then do subdivision surfaces down the road. Add sound when you need it. Texturing is free with current graphics boards, so that can go in at the beginning.

I believe that we are on the brink of a true revolution in graphics technology; and that we will leave pure software renderers behind in the next couple of years; so having a system that evolves with the upcoming graphics hardware could be a very useful and unique thing.

I also believe that Maya will probably be the last of the all-singing/all-dancing commercial animation systems. If you want to do everything that it does, you'll have to invest the 500 or so man-years that they put into it. To do that in a commercial system, with the frighteningly small size of the visual effects/animation market, is folly. I don't think it will be done again.

thad

Whoops. Hammerhead didn't write their own renderer for Deep Blue Sea. Browsing hammerhead.com it looks like they wrote their own animation software.

The people demand an answer!

We did the zero-g fire in Red Planet We did some research into what it would really do; and ordered the NASA videos of their tests with zero-g fire. Unfortunately, the real thing is somewhat boring, in the best case you get an undulating spherical blob. In most cases, though, the fire goes out on its own pretty fast due to the lack of convection (unless the thing burning has its own oxygen supply, as was the case on MIR when one of the oxygen-generating 'candles' caught on fire.)

We tried to do our best to make it interesting and not stray too far from reality. We were vindicated when the LA Times got the Physics department at CalTech to review the movie. They said that everything in the movie was completely wrong, except for the zero-g fire which they thought was pretty cool.

thad

Typo in ur URL. It's www.hammerhead.com

I left PDI six years ago to start my own company, and I've lost touch with Jim; I had heard vaguely that he'd 'gone back to school', but I had no idea that he was up to something this big. It's great to see an old friend make such a great contribution in a new field. Way to go, Jim!

Another old friend of mine, Carter Burwell, went the other way, from doing genetics with Crick at his Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, to working on early computer graphics at NYIT in the early 80s, to becoming one of the pioneers in digital music, and is finally now a leading composer for films such as the recent O Brother, Where Art Thou (somehow passed over by the Academy).

And I'm still just making pictures :) Oh well.

thad

Unfortunately, real zero-g fire pretty much goes out right away as, in general, there is no draft to bring fresh reaction products in. The only unintentional fire in a spaceship was the one on Mir, a few years ago, discussed in Linenger's book -- what was burning there was an 'oxygen candle', which of course could supply its own oxygen to the flame.

Of course, the studio just wanted something that looked cool, so we made some assumptions that made reasonable scientific sense and still looked cool -- the fire was usually a surface the moved through the atmosphere, the idea being that the fire would oxidize the fuel as it went; but it didn't just sit in one place and burn.

For the (other) nerds out there, the animation was all done with my own Z animation system and rendered with Pixar's Renderman on our Linux render garden (5 machines doesn't count as a render farm.)

thad

Well Linux doesn't have anything to do with getting effects, cheaper probably, but it's up to the artists and technicians involved. Actually a lot of companies are looking and using Linux at the moment, like Digital Domain (renderin g on Titanic for example), Rhythm and Hues (their work on getting 16 bit Gimp and application porting) and Hammerhead (they even have Linux software to give away). This last SIGGRAPH you copuld here a lot of people from the industry talking about it.