How to Morph Drawings

Hand-drawn animation requires you to spend a lot of time tracing in-between drawings. Harmony's morphing feature can help speed up the process. This powerful feature automatically creates computer-generated drawings between your vector drawings to save time and increase productivity. You can easily modify the timing and velocity (ease in and ease out) of a morphing animation.

One of the main uses of the morphing feature is effects animation. For example, animating smoke or water can be time-consuming because these types of effects are usually slow moving requiring a large number of closely placed inbetweens.

The morphing feature is used to animate similar and simple shapes such as hair or smoke. It helps you by saving time when you are working on tedious inbetweening and tracing tasks This, in turn, provides you with more time to spend on complex animation tasks such as walk cycles or acrobatic sequences.

To learn how to morph drawings, it is better to start with basic shapes such as circles and rectangles. Once you are more familiar with the tool, you can increase your knowledge and expertise. In a very short time you will be producing some remarkable effects.

It is helpful to know the pros and cons of morphing before you start. Understanding what you can do and which drawing lines may be more useful or problematic will enable you to design your key drawings so they morph efficiently.

NOTE: The more complex the shape is, the longer it takes to morph. If it takes more time to morph a drawing than to hand-draw it, then it is better to animate it instead of morphing. However, if you spot an occasion when you can morph your drawings, do it! It allows you to fix your timing and velocity in no time without having to create any extra drawings!

Adjusting the Morphing Velocity

When you look at your animation you will notice that the morphing motion is constant. To produce a less mechanical motion, you will probably want to create some ease in or ease out.

Adding Morph Hints

Harmony's Morphing tool allows you to control your morphing sequence in many ways. One of those ways is to place hints to ensure Harmony morphs your drawings the way you intended.

Hints are points that are placed in both the source and destination drawings to associate zones and lines between the two drawings. They are used to fix errors in the way Harmony morphs drawings, such as a line that is not following the colour fill zone, or when a part of your source drawing doesn't morph into its corresponding part of the destination drawing. By default, Harmony will associate a corner or a point in the source drawing with the nearest corner or point in the destination drawing. Hence, hints quickly become necessary if the shape being morphed or its movement is complex.