I would like to morph between two characters, changing only the facial expression. Is this  possible in VideoScribe? I've tried creating two identical SVGs, altering only the strokes associated with the face, but VS "blows" the morph up. I have yet to see any effective use of the morph feature because it is so random. There is no sense of "transition" between to similar SVGs.

Hi,

Videoscribe blows up the morph because the nodes in image1 are not in the exact same order as the nodes in image2.

tip 1)  if you are only morphing the face then make the body an svg by itself and make the face a separate svg. You don't HAVE to do this but it may help keep memory usage lower if you are doing multiple morphs.

tip 2) draw "face1", save it as an SVG, then make a copy of the svg and rename the copy "face2". Don't draw any new lines or add or delete any nodes on either face, just move the nodes around to change the expression on one of the faces and re-save it. Use those for your morph.

tip3) you could make an animated gif for the face instead.

I hope that helps,
-Mike (videoscribe user)

 

Thanks for the tips. I realized it had to do with maintaining the same lines, but my tests still didn't work. I will try a simpler test.

What do you mean by "nodes"? 

Oh! I refer to nodes as "anchor points". When I did not change the "anchor points" the morph worked as expected! Thanks.

Related question: I:

1. Duplicated the SVG

2. Made minor changes

3. Imported SVG1 and duplicated

4. Replaced duplicate with SVG2

After replacing SVG1 with SVG2 they do not register. Why? They are identical except for moving a few nodes, not affecting the bounding box.

Answer:

I am saving SVGs from Adobe Illustrator. When I open the "exported" SVG I see that my "template" layer is also included, even though it was disabled when exporting the SVG. This caused the SVG bounding box to be different. There are still a few glitches, but it's getting better.

Oh that's a good point. I forgot to consider the bounding box which I believe is determined by four (or in some cases as few as two) nodes/anchor points (the highest, the lowest, the leftmost and the rightmost).  If you move any one of them then the perceived size of the image changes.

To get around that, you can either
1) include the outline of the head along with the face in the same SVG (assuming that the shape of the head does not change when the face changes
or
2) include a 0% opacity circle (with no stroke) that encompasses all of the nodes/anchor points in the SVGs. The circle must be in the same exact position in the two SVGs to make them line up properly I think.

-Mike (videoscribe user)

 

Placing a no stroke/no fill bounding stroke doesn't seem to work. It is drawn as a black stroke during the morph animation.

Oh I see, that does not work. you are correct.

I accidentally morphed the same SVG to itself and found it still goes out of register while morphing, It ends up in the right place but the head outline is out of register during the morph. This tells me the registration problem may also be an issue with VideoScribe.

I think I'm better off leaving the head outline off. There should be a better solution, I think.

Well, I'm just flat disappointed with the morph feature. It does NOT work smoothly and is pretty much unusable for "tweening" animation. Too bad.

I as also trying to simply transition between to nearly identical SVGs by setting the "Animation time" to "0". Even though the images are registered the "morph" jerks before settling back into position. I don't understand why this is happening, but I've decided it is a limitaion of VideoScribe.