Morphing

Description

This chapter briefly describes the morphing technique supported by Candera.

See also:

Example Solutions

Refer to following solutions in folder cgi_studio_player/content/Tutorials/08_SpecialRenderTechniques/0801_Special3DRenderTechniques

Introduction 

Morphing

Morphing means transforming the 3D geometry of an object smoothly from one shape into another.

Morphing itself (smooth interpolation between vertices) is done in a shader (not on the CPU).

What you need for Morphing

Suitable content: "Morph targets" are different geometric states of the same object. The input vertices must correspond one-to-one between morph targets. This means, to morph between two shapes, you need two VertexBuffer with exactly the same number of vertices.

An instance of MorphingMesh: This is a Mesh that stores

Dynamics: Morphing is about change, so an application will have to set some morphing parameters (often depending on time). Use Animation::AllMorphWeightsPropertySetter to animation all the weight values of the MorphingMesh.

Morphing Examples 

Morphing between 2 Morph Items

In below example solution, the reference shader RefTransLight1Morph_RefColor is used to morph between two morph items, by default having weight value 1,00 on the logo.

The animation part of this solution animates both weight values and also adds a rotation animation.

Morphing between Multiple Shapes using Shader

Since a MorphingMesh is capable of handling up to 8 different vertex buffers, a special morphing shader must be used for more than 2 shapes. A morphing shader handling 5 shapes is used in the example below:

Morphing between Multiple Shapes using AnimationGroup

As an alternative to using a multi morph shader, multi-step morphing can also be realized by using an AnimationGroup, chaining separate morphing animations for each morphing shape pair. This approach is useful in case a specific target shader compiler has some restrictions regarding the maximum number of shader parameters.