It was done with a free website called 3dthis.com and of course Shotcut.
You just need to sign up with an email, they don’t send a link to enable, so use a fake email or you may get spammed.
I don’t know how trustworthy that site is.
Anyways, once you select the two pics you want to morph (follow the instructions)
it will create a series of png files and play them sequentially on the site.
It would be too much of a hassle to use each png in an animation, so,
load up OBS and create a “browser” item.
Record it as video.
Throw it into Shotcut and edit.
BTW, when morphing images, ensure the backgrounds are similar, else you will see it
as a change of colour in the video.
I have a couple of ideas I’d like to try. It may take a day or two as I am working on another project at the moment, but if I get it work I’ll get back to you.
I managed to do a morphing experiment using SVG files, to convert the Egyptian Vulture hieroglyph (representing “aleph” as per Gardiner’s sign list) into the letter A.
It was extremely fiddly to do and is by no means perfect. I used Inkscape to create the SVGs, getting the hieroglyph from its UTF code and converting it to a path. I then interpolated the letter-A path onto the hieroglyph’s path using the Polymorph javascript library Polymorph (notoriousb1t.github.io) and fed this into the GSAP animation library.
The main problem is getting the 2 SVG symbols to match, which is extremely fiddly. It isn’t something I would recommend for anything but 1 or 2 morphs. Unfortunately as soon as the morphing starts you lose the fine detail of the hieroglyph, only seeing its outline. My attempt can be seen in this video clip:
It is an interesting project and I’ll see if I can come up with anything better, but it will take a bit of time I’m afraid. If anyone else is interested in hieroglyphics, there is a special typewriter app here:
I will look into a way of automating this so “non-technical” users are able to use it. If you are just looking at “alphabetic” hieroglyphic characters, such as my example, this is fairly easy.
I notice that the font you mentioned, PharaohGlyph, has only 100 glyphs (fewer if you count some that have left- and right-facing variations, indicating whether the text is left-to-right, or vice versa). It is not difficult to create an SVG file for each of these, but then you have to create the English equivalent and some characters have several meanings (e.g. “enemy”, “angry”, “hate” etc…) it would be necessary to create SVG files of these. Finally there are combinations of hieroglyphs (e.g. “father”, “daughter”) that translate to one English word, creating SVGs for these would be more difficult.
I’ll look into it a bit further and do a bit of experimenting to see just what is reasonably possible and what would require more effort.
I haven’t had much time to work on this.We had a Coptic wind on Thursday which dumped a load of sand from the Sahara onto Cyprus and I spent most of yesterday clearing up and today was a golf day.
I have refined the way the SVGs are produced and they now look much better (see the video below). I have started to work on simplifying the mechanism for producing the morphing, but it will still take quite a bit of time. Can you give me an example (in words) of a specific morph you want to do? If I created something that accepted a hieroglyph and morphed it into a single character would that work, or you looking at morphing a hieroglyph into a word?
The current state of the morphing looks like this: