MORPHER

Welcome to MORPHER, the extension that brings morphing to Aseprite!

While morphing is as old as hand-drawn animation, the tools used to automate it remain in the worlds of CGI and Vector graphics. There are many valid technical reasons for that; nevertheless, we believe that there are ways to morph one cluster of pixels into another, and that is what MORPHER is all about.

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So far we have 3 separate working animation engines, divided into 3 separate tabs in the .lua extension.

More are (actively) in the work, and anyone who gets the extension will have access to all future engines. 

Here is a short presentation of the three engines so far:

ENGINE 1. PARTICLE

This engine treats your art like a cloud of dust or a "vortex." It calculates the center of your shape and sorts every pixel by its angle.

By using Polar Coordinates, it pairs pixels from the start and end shapes based on their circular position. This ensures that as they move, they follow a "swirly," organic path rather than a straight line.

ENGINE 2. SCANLINE

This engine acts like a 3D printer or a scanner. It looks at your image row-by-row, from top-to-bottom and left-to-right, to create a rigid structural map. 

It uses Linear 1:1 Mapping. Because it preserves the "grid" order of the pixels, the horizontal and vertical relationships stay intact.

ENGINE 3. BACTERIAL

This is a biological simulation where pixels act like a living colony. It doesn't move pixels; instead, it decides which pixels should be "born" and which should "die" based on their neighbors. 

It uses Cellular Automata and Distance Fields. It creates a "scent" from the target shape; on every frame, pixels are allowed to spawn only if they are touching an existing pixel, and move closer to that target scent.

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How do you use MORPHER ? 

We tried to make it as simple as humanly possible.

After sliding the .lua extension in Aseprite script's folder, you will need three things: 

1 - A "starter" cel (or frame) with some drawn pixels on it, on the layer of your choice.

2 - As many empty cels as you need your morphing to last, after your "starter" frame.

3 - A "destination" cel, with (hopefully) a different set of drawn pixels at the end. 

Just select the "starter" cel ; drag and select the empty cels all the way up to the "destination" ; go to -> File -> Scripts -> Morpher, choose which engine you want to use, click on the MORPH! button and... Voilà! 

All the empty cels are now "morphing" from the "starter" to the "destination".

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Notes : 

- All three engines now support "chain morphing", which means you can have as many "destination" cels as you want, one after the other, just make sure to leave some empty frames in between them, and to select the whole chain.

- All engines now support color and opacity morphing, which means you can smoothly change color and opacity, and play with transparent <-> opaque morphing effects. 

So you can also just use MORPHER to quickly change JUST the color and/or opacity of two identical shapes over the course of however many frames you want, which is faster than most tweeners out there).

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Finally, we love Aseprite, we love its community, and  we truly believe that with your help and support, we can make MORPHER an even greater tool. 

So don't be shy, comment what you think about it, send ideas and suggestions, we will read them, and we will take them into consideration for future builds.

Much love, it's MORPHIN' TIME! (I had to do it...)

MagicBerry