If you have seen the movie “Willow” you may be familiar with the old Elastic Reality Morpher application, which allowed you to morph between two images by setting some user defined points between the two images. As it turns out from TD Survival’s Alan Fregtman uncovers that MAorpher is actually embedded in Autdoesk’s Softimage.
In this video Alan explains how to use the remains of Avid ElasticReality, the #1 morphing solution (in the 90s.)
A small company called ASDG which started developing products for the Amiga, created Morph Plus which evolved into Elastic Reality for Mac and SGI systems, renamed itself to Elastic Reality Inc, in 1993. Shortly After, Avid acquired them and Morph and was then called Avid ElasticReality and dropped the pice tag of from the 5,000 SGI version to 3,000 $ for an IRIX version.
Some time in 1997, the core code of Avid Elastic Reality was actually implemented as an effect in Avid’s Media Illusion 5 at the time, and late in 2006 it was incorperated as an FXTree Node in Softimage’s Compositing environment, where it has been until this very day. Interesting to see something like that survive and be readapted into something like Softimage.
Alan provides great tips and tutorials through TD Survival, and also has a TD Survival FaceBook component that you should check out as well.
