RE:Flex Tutorial

This short tutorial provides two simple examples to help you get an initial idea of how to setup warping and morphing projects with RE:Flex. It is meant as a companion to the documentation as opposed to a substitute.

1) Load the picture pete.tif and richard.tif in your system. Using Repeat, make each of them a 25 pictures movie.

Tutorial 1 : RE:Flex Warp

2) Select the RE:Flex Warp spark and select the pete reel as source clip. Load the REFlex Warp setup SimpleWarp.
Below is what you should see on Control Page 1: Notice A. the display mode is UNWarped Image.

3) Notice as well, B. Use Boundary. The Boundary Shape is a shape that allows you to limit warping to pixels inside of that shape.
Now switch to Control Page 2.

4) Set it to Warped Mode D. -- Now you should see the warped image. Press on a line between two vertices on an eyebrow. The whole shape should become highlighted. Move it around... voila!

Notice C. is not turned on. This means the current shape is not the Boundary shape. Using E. Prev Shape, move to the previous shape until you find the Boundary shape. The boundary shape is displayed with a ticker line.

Set Warped Mode D. back to UNWarped.
Press Create and once the green cursor appears add some shape on the face within the Boundary shape area. To end the shape creation, press Create again (other ways are documented in RE:FLEX manual). Now move back to Warped Mode, unselect all points by pressing anywhere on the image, and select one vertex of the newly created shape. Move it around, you should be warping accordingly the image. Now leave poor Pete alone :)

Tutorial 2 : RE:Flex Morph

Now select the effect RE:Flex Morph

1) Select pete clip as front and richard clip as back
2) Load the setup SimpleMorph.REFlex_Morph
3) Go to Control Page 1

4) Set the Display Mode to "UnWarped From Image" A.
5) Select a vertex (anyone) by pressing on it
6) Set the Display Mode to "UnWarped To Image" B. below

7) Go to frame 13. This has previously been animated The Global Warp Value should now be 50%.
8) Switch to Warped and Blended Mode, D. below

9) Play with the Global Warp and Global Blend value to see what it does.

Now maybe we want the hair to be animated faster or differently then the rest of the face. So we can select the 3 hair lines (selecting the shape by pressing between two vertex, holding the CNTL key down allows you to select multiple shapes)

These turns out to be Shape 1, Shape 2 and Shape 14. Then we can go in the channel editor and control the shape of the curve.
By putting the Display Mode to "Control Image" you can see the visual result of per shape blending which can be useful when you have a lot of shapes to actually understand what is happening.