This is a project I did to learn the Warper node in Shape 3.5. I wrote this tutorial for my students and friends who are trying to learn how to use this new tool that was introduced to Shake in version 3.5. It's a great feature and there's a lot of potential of this node.
NOTE! Remember that the warper and morpher nodes take up a lot of memory. The higher res images will require more ram to calculate.
In this movie the main character isn't moving much so it won't require too much animation on our part.
Click on the Warp tap and select the Warper node.
Right click and select finish shape.
A new shape parameter appears automatically each time you create a new shape.
Name this shape source_LeftArmOut.
NOTE. If your warp is going to require a lot of shapes remember to name them so you can find them easily and go back and adjust them when needed.
My suggestion is to name them according to shape_type. For example we named the first shape source_LeftArmOut because it is the "source" shape and it represents the left arm's outer edge. For simple shapes you will use something like source_eye or target_brow.
Alright now back to that "won't require too much animation" I was talking about. Even though he doesn't move much, you'll notice he does move slightly. Make sure that you go through and animate source_LeftArmOut to match his movement
Now we need to create our target shape. The target shape is the shape that you want your image to deform to. We want the arms to appear huge so we want to stretch the arms out. What we're going to do is put two shapes on either side of the arms and pull them out.
Select source_LeftArmOut and right click and select copy shapes.
Right click on the viewer and select paste shapes.
Now a new shape appears in the parameters of the warper node. Name this target_LeftArmOut. This will represent the shape we want to use to deform our arm.
Click and drag the shape out and away from the actor. The farther we drag the shape the more distorted it will appear.
Click on the connect shapes button. Using this tool we will connect the source shape and the target shape. To connect the two shapes click on the source shape first, the shape turns light blue.
Now click on the target shape. It turns purple and connection lines are automatically added between the two shapes.
The overallDisplacement is automatically turned on. Let's set it to zero for the time since this will slow down our progress.
0 turns the overallDisplacement off and 1 turns it on. Most likely you'll experiment with different numbers between 0 and 1 to get the right effect. Or you can key this setting for an animated warp effect.
Right now the source, target, and connection shapes are getting in the way of our viewer, so let's turn them off and create the shapes for the inner part of the left arm.
Click on the V button in the warper parameters to turn the visibility off. Now we should have a nice clean screen to work with without deleting our shapes. If for some reason you ever make a mistake and need to delete a shape just click on the X to delete the shape.
Create a shape for the inner part of the left arm move it to the right slightly stretching the arm out.
Set the overallDisplacement to 0.6
You'll notice that the background is warped along with the actor, an effect we didn't want. It's good to either film warping or morphing images on blue screens or you can create a rotoshape. For this shot I created a rotoshape to mask out the character.
Now the background is fixed and we have a muscular arm to show off.
Repeat the process for the right arm.
Now let's do some shapes to deform the face. Some common features of the face that can be used to be distorted are the eyes, brow, nose, and mouth.
Here's an example of what I did.
Since the Hulk is a figure of strength not intelligence so I lowered the brow and raised the nose to decrease the look of intelligence in the actor. I also lowered the mouth. I tried to copy a caricature of an apish creature.
Add more shapes to tweak the look of the character to look more like our big green friend.
NOTE! Make sure none of your shapes intersect or your image won't distort correctly.
NOTE! You can animate the overallDisplacement to make it look like he's transforming by setting keyframes throughout the timeline.
BIG GREEN MOTHER....HUSH YOUR MOUTH!
Ok now let's give him some green tint. First let's mask off the arms and face with a Rotoshape.
Go to the Color tab and add a Mult node before the Warper node. This way we won't have to animate the Rotoshape when the shot is distorted by the Warper node. Change the Mult color to a green color.
Plug the Rotoshape into the mask input of the Mult.
Now animate the color change along with the Warper by setting keyframes in the Mult or by adding a Fade node to the rotoshape and setting keyframes to the Fade.
For my final movie I added more color correction nodes and used the Quickpaint node to paint in veins and mask out the tracker markers in the background.
