Creating Morph Animations with 3ds Max (basic)

Morph animation enables you to smoothly transition from one facial animation to another, for example to make a face go smoothly from frowning to smiling. This tutorial shows how to create and export morph animations from 3ds Max.

Process

Select the mesh and make a number of clone-copies of the mesh and move them to the side (this shift is dropped in the export tool.)

1. Load in a file with a mesh on which you want to perform morph animation.
2. select the mesh to be morphed (In this example, it is head01)
3. Choose Edit > Clone > Copy > Name the Meshes. This example uses iterations of the same name: head02, head03, and so on.
4. Select each morph target mesh and at the root level in the stack move the verticies to create a new shape. Be careful not to delete or add verticies or your morpher modifier will fail at bind.
5. Here is an example:
6. Select the Base mesh and add the Morpher Modifier
7. In the morpher modifier rollout select and assign the morph target heads to their respective channels.
8. Testing – After all your morph meshes are targeted into channels, adjust their weighting in the rollout and then you will be able to see the changes in your base mesh.
   
9. Follow these steps:
   • Goto frame 1.  Make sure all the morph target influences are at 0 (zero).
   • Keyframe the animation
   • Go to frame 10.
   • Set the weight on all the morph targets to 100.
   • Keyframe the animation.
10. Export the model/animation