9.5.2

992 • CHAPTER 19
TIMELINE • 993
 Ctrl-click on the Material sequence at frame 0 to create a key. In the Attribute
manager, note that the Wood material is already assigned.
 Ctrl-click on the Material sequence at frame 90 to create another key.
 Now drag the marble material from the Material manager and drop it into
the Material box in the Attribute manager. This assigns the marble material to
the sphere at this point in the animation.
 Render the animation and then play it back (or use the Make Preview
command; make sure the Preview Mode is set to Full Render). The sphere
morphs gradually from wood to marble.
At this stage, the Timeline is still in manual mode and displays the Texture tag only. To switch
the Timeline back to automatic mode so that all elements are displayed, in the Timeline, choose
Edit > Automatic Mode or click the lock icon at the top right of the window.
New Track > Morph
Using this track, you can smoothly transform one shape into another. You can morph Polygon objects
and Spline objects; however, you cannot morph primitives or spline primitives. You can only morph
between objects that have the same number of points. For example, you cannot morph a sphere into a
cube when the sphere has many more points. Rather, you should morph between modied duplicates
of an object. For example, if you use the magnet or another modeling tool to fashion a copy of a sphere
into a cube, you can then morph between a sphere and a cube.
Before you can morph an object, you need to create target objects (duplicates of the original).