Bending letters using morphs?

EightiesIsEnough

I remember this rarely seen segment from my childhood, during the golden years of Sesame Street.  Anybody remember this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNL-Xq2XQzE

If you notice in this clip, when the lecturer explained the visual appearance of a letter, the letter flips upside down to become another letter, and it bends backwards while in the process.  It's unfortunate that the Muppet had to resort to plan B (this skit does not involve the letter B, by the way) to conclude his lecture, thanks to the very uncooperative letter.

Is there any way I could create a letter and possibly add morphs to allow for a bending ability like in this skit?  I know I could create any letter object in Sketchup using a simple font, and export it into an OBJ file.

Richard Haseltine

A morph wouldn't really work for that as it moves the vertices in straight lines, so going from M to W it would flaten down to a plane at mid-height and then grow again. If you want bends you really need a rigged figure.

Catherine3678ab

Needs a lot of mesh to morph but the concept is possible. This was a "5 minute job" made using Hexagon and D/S.

.avi upload not allowed, okay ... click here.

EightiesIsEnough

This sounds promising, however the video will not play.  Is there any way you could convert the video to .mp4 or something?

Have you considered using a program called Handbrake to convert AVI to MP4?

Ascania

Plays fine here. Although I note that it is only working from the front view.

lilweep

Richard Haseltine said:

A morph wouldn't really work for that as it moves the vertices in straight lines, so going from M to W it would flaten down to a plane at mid-height and then grow again. If you want bends you really need a rigged figure.

You could just create a bunch of intermediate morphs. Not sure if that would be quicker than rigging and animating...

Catherine3678ab

That little .02 second .avi file was created in Daz Studio. Was only showing the front view. A more polished model to be seen from any side would take more than 5 minutes to create.

Morphing or rigging, the model will require a fair amount of mesh to play nicely.

.............

I made another one and this time saved it.

If you flip the M to W it will do as Richard says, go flat in the middle.

Using Hexagon, it was tasked to its limit so we're lucky to get the morphs made funky as they are.

It'll be a good laugh for somebody I'm sure. Perfect M to Perfect W, goofy in the middle ;-)

btw - made the letter in Hexagon using a line, adding thickness and then a 'ton' of mesh.