the magic of dynamic morphing

At the end of every year, I like to reflect on the techniques I learned that I felt had the most positive impacts on my creative works. One of them has to do with something that I like to call "dynamic morphing".

But first, a bit of backstory. As you know, I morph the models that I use to enhance their looks. Most hobbyists and artists within this 3D sphere do so since the models on their own can quite literally be very flat and unappealing.

Morphs are good, but unfortunately morphs will also deform as you're posing the model. The more extreme the pose, the worse the deformation becomes, and often times that will ruin my seemingly perfect set of morphs.

For pretty much the entire time that I've been a hobbyist of this pursuit, I put up with the deformation. I figured it just kinda came with the territory of posing these relatively low-tech models and that people would understand. Eventually as my skills with Photoshop continued to progress, I decided that I wanted to fix whatever issues I could during post-processing. The warp tool became a friend, as it let me enhance certain physical features fairly easily compared to doing it before a render. Unfortunately, the tool is a bit unreliable from a creative perspective, so another solution was needed.

Around the middle of the year, when I was tinkering with the remastered version of #79 - big foot orc, it became obvious real quick that my new fat morphs would absolutely not work with the poses that Mr. Hornyfang was in. So it was then that I started to try out this new "dynamic morphing" approach seriously to see if it could work. And it did. I called them "bespoke morphs" at the time, which they absolutely are by nature.

Basically how it works is that after I pose a character, I permanently "bake in" their existing morphs (I keep backups of course in case I need to change things). I then create a new set of morphs that more easily allow me to tweak whatever is needed for the final look. I usually use these dynamic morphs nowadays to greatly enhance features like pecs/moobs since I love them so much, clearly.

It all sounds pretty simple on paper, but the execution is much trickier and is why I call it dynamic. You would think that it's pretty straightforward to say make a belly bigger once the model is in some crazy contortionist pose, but it's not. Often times you have to meticulously manipulate specific groups of polygons into seemingly illogical positions just to get the precise look that you want for that pose and for that particular camera angle. 

It's definitely a technique that requires a careful touch and keen eye imo, but it's certainly a new tool in my toolkit that I appreciate very much.