The header says it all, I need to animate a ball bouncing around a box this is the easy bit, then I need to morph that ball into a letter? any ideas folks. I realise that when you morph you need to have the same numbers of vertices, any suggestions on how I could do this???

Make your sphere out of a segmented plane: Use the Bend modifier to turn it into a cylinder, then put an Edit Mesh modifier on top to shape it the rest of the way.

Now make a copy of that and delete the modifiers for your letter.

- Geoff

In reply to:

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Make your sphere out of a segmented plane: Use the Bend modifier to turn it into a cylinder, then put an Edit Mesh modifier on top to shape it the rest of the way.

Now make a copy of that and delete the modifiers for your letter.

- Geoff

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Am I to build a sphere and a letter out of this cylinder?
I was hoping to use the default text and extrude.
is it possible to morph a shpere into a letter created with the text button?

Oh, I thought you meant letter as in piece-of-paper-with-writing-on-it. Now I feel silly.

If the effect can happen quickly, you could make the ball shrink while a letter inside it grows to the proper size.

And another option could be to take a couple hours and deform a copy of the sphere into the letter. Not easy, but it's probably do-able.

- Geoff

*cough* "in theory" (sorry haven't got time to try it at the moment.)
If your letter is Geometry... create a cube large enough to encapsulate your letter and with a different material id then boolean unify it with the letter. Add spherify modifier turned up to full. Match both materials. Final point...... reduce spherify to zero and change the cube material to transparent. OK .. pretty hammy and perhaps not good enough though you could create opacity maps to alter the way the sphere/box becomes transparent.. might be worth a try.
You can morph objects without the same vertex counts in Max but I've not found it very feasible.....what you have to do is to create 2 boxes with the same vertex counts and conform each box to an object (hiding the wrap to objects.. i.e the letter and the sphere) and then morph between the two boxes.. this does tend to leave noticeable creases though.

In reply to:

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*cough* "in theory" (sorry haven't got time to try it at the moment.)
If your letter is Geometry... create a cube large enough to encapsulate your letter and with a different material id then boolean unify it with the letter. Add spherify modifier turned up to full. Match both materials. Final point...... reduce spherify to zero and change the cube material to transparent. OK .. pretty hammy and perhaps not good enough though you could create opacity maps to alter the way the sphere/box becomes transparent.. might be worth a try.
You can morph objects without the same vertex counts in Max but I've not found it very feasible.....what you have to do is to create 2 boxes with the same vertex counts and conform each box to an object (hiding the wrap to objects.. i.e the letter and the sphere) and then morph between the two boxes.. this does tend to leave noticeable creases though.

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I only have one question about"spherify".what's the "spherify"? I don't understand this word.

it's a modifier in your modifier selection tab.