Blender 2.77 Morph between shapes

In this one minute video tutorial we create a morphing effect between two different shapes in Blender:

Written version:

Let’s begin by adding a cone and a uv-sphere on top of each other.

Then we’ll add the shrinkwrap modifier to the sphere, set the cone as the target shape and enter edit mode. Clicking on this button will allow us to see the results in edit mode.

Now we’ll simply scale the mesh up until it fully covers the cone shape.

In object mode we can now turn the shrinkwrap modifier into a shape-key and delete the original cone. If we move this slider, we now have a morph between the sphere and the cone. We can of course animate this by adding keyframes with the eye key, while hovering over the slider.

Now let’s take a look at a more difficult morph where we want to control the location of vertices a bit more.

Here we have a cube and suzanne, with three subdivision surface levels. Let’s apply the subsurf, and then we’ll duplicate suzanne.

Let’s now add the shrinkwrap modifier and target the cube. We’ll apply it immediately and add it a second time to make editing the mesh a bit easier.

Now let’s go to edit mode, enable the “display modifier in edit mode” -button, and switch to local view with the slash key. We want the eyes to morph from the top, so we’ll move them there using the proportional editing tool.

Now let’s move the rest of the mesh into a cube shape as well. We’ll speed this part up to make it less boring to watch.

We’ll scale it a bit in the end just to make sure it’s a perfect cube.

Now let’s go back into object mode and exit local view. We’ll apply the modifier and double check that our both meshes have the same number of vertices, which they should have since they are made from an identical mesh.

Then we’ll select both objects, and go to the shape key area. Here we’ll select the join as shapes command. When we drag the slider, our cube is morphing into suzanne. Let’s go to solid view and move the original cube to another layer so that it doesn’t block the view. Look how the eyes are morphing in from the top because that’s where we placed them.

Here’s the finished render.