Looking Back: Morphing with AE

The Creative Cow website is an incredible resource and it has certainly grown since its launch. I have been proud to contribute several articles to the Creative Cow site over the years but as software and techniques change with time not all of those articles are still current. I thought it would be interesting to look at the articles I’ve written and make some observations about how they stand up today…

Original article: Morphing with AE.

This was the first article I had published on the Cow and I’ve often suspected it’s the most popular. It was written in October 2002 and I still get emails from people asking questions or simply thanking me for it.

Ironically, although it’s the oldest article it’s probably still the most relevant because none of the AE upgrades since version 5.5 have directly superceded the Reshape effect. If you want to do a simple morph then you could still follow the tutorial and get a decent result. However for anything more complicated I would almost certainly use the Liquify effect instead of Reshape – it offers much more control over the distortion process. The 3 basic stages of a morph effect outlined in the tutorial introduction would still apply, but by using Liquify instead of Reshape you can manually line up features like eyes and mouths as well as the overall outlines.

So in summary – the article is still relevant but for more control I would use the Liquify effect instead of Reshape.