Best noob-level 3D graphics program for kinky morph effects?

May 1, 2024 5:07 PM

I'm a noob interested in making kinky 3D animated shorts where people transform into other people and things. I'm trying to find out which program would be best for this and I'm having trouble getting straight answers. CGI snowflakes within.

Assume that I am aware of Blender and hate it like poison. I know, Blender can do anything, it's free, etc., but the interface gives me the same feeling of numb horror I used to experience in math class. I want something that won't take me many months to learn the basics, and ideally something where I can do everything I need in one program. Here are the programs I'm looking at...

* iClone: Expensive, but maybe I could actually learn it? I've tried to find out if it's capable of transformation morphs, but "morphs" and "transformations" apparently mean something else to people who actually know something about computer graphics. I just want to turn people into other people! Why is this so hard?

* Daz: I'm not too fond of the "Daz look," but maybe I could do something with it. I've read forum posts where people say it probably can't do morphs, but I find it hard to believe that a program that seems designed for furry smut can't do this! You're telling me Daz can't turn a man turn into a sexy bunnygirl? Come on.

* Replikant: The new kid on the block. The program makes my laptop wheeze, I get a scammy vibe from the company and there's almost no community to turn to for tech support questions. So, can this program do morphs? Can it even do naked people?

Finally, is there some great program I'm missing? Please, help make my dreams of kinky transformation cartoons a reality!

posted by Ursula Hitler to Media & Arts (14 answers total)

I haven't tried it but there's Bforartists, which is a Blender fork with a simplified UI.
posted by MagnificentVacuum at 6:00 PM on May 1

I'm a person with a lot of experience in 3D animation software and the thing is they are just actually really complicated and hard and will take you many months to learn the basics. I'm not sure what you mean by 'kinky transformation cartoons' but what you're looking for is not really possible.
posted by caitcadieux at 6:27 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]

Both a connoisseur of kinky (mostly furry) art and someone with a background in computer science here, with a basic knowledge of 3D graphics--enough to know that it's not a particularly easy field to learn. Seconding that there isn't really an off-the-shelf piece of software that does this automatically to my knowledge. The sort of transformation you're looking for (turn one model into another and automatically generate the in-between steps) would involve a lot of work that is just not possible to automate without some very specific constraints on the models and so forth and I suspect by the time you've learned enough to come up with the models to fit those constraints or to apply those constraints to existing models you'll have gotten most of the way towards doing it manually anyway.

3D graphics is a field that people get college degrees for (and is pretty math-heavy to boot), and is definitely a case of the progress in the field making the tools more powerful rather than making them easy and accessible. I don't see a way around taking many months/years to learn a new skill on this one.

IME most of the kinky 3D animation work out there is either done by moonlighting professionals (or pros that have switched to making a living off of crowdfunding), by people that have put in a lot of time to learn, or by people teaching themselves some basic animation skills and using models that were created by other people to animate them in Source Filmmaker or Blender or what-have-you.
posted by Aleyn at 1:51 PM on May 2

Response by poster: OK, so, I look at a page like this, and it sure seems like they're talking about morphing a character... but then I read posts on forums, and people are saying that transformation isn't a thing in these programs! Is it that you can only morph characters during the design process, using sliders to make them taller or shorter or whatever, but then once you're actually using them in animation they're locked and you can't transform them onscreen?

It seems like the tech to morph characters already exists. I could point you to a dozen videos for 3D programs and games where somebody slides a slider and we see a character radically transform. Monster Factory is a whole show where the McElroy brothers deform hapless game characters while we watch! So, why can't these companies include transformation capabilities in the animation process itself?
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:33 PM on May 2

Response by poster: I'm more confused than ever. So, say you want to redesign a skinny character as a Hulk. You can use sliders in the character creation window to do that. Click, click, skinny to big muscles, done. Then maybe you want to turn that character green. Click, click, the character is now green. You have now made a Hulk. You watched the transformation happen, on your monitor. You saw the muscles bulge and the skin go green. Why can't you put any of that in an animation? I mean, you could set up a screen recorder, and get some footage of a transformation that way. It would have the UI around it and it wouldn't be pretty, but you'd have footage of the character Hulking out, kind of. So, why can't you do a transformation like that as an animated sequence?
posted by Ursula Hitler at 7:10 PM on May 2

That's changing the parameters on a model, not morphing between 2 different models that probably have different topologies, modifiers, maps, etc.
Most animation software lets you animate parameter changes, so your hulking out example would be feasible.
posted by signal at 7:25 PM on May 2 [1 favorite]

Assuming the parameters for skinny to hulk exist in the first place in the software, of course.
posted by signal at 7:26 PM on May 2

Yeah, in those cases the hard work of figuring out how the vertices of the model need to adjust for the new shape was figured out in advance by the person doing the modelling, and the slider does that adjustment. The model itself needs to be designed in such a way to support that, it isn't something that works automatically, and even if a model supports it, that really doesn't get you closer to your goal.
posted by Aleyn at 8:37 PM on May 2

Response by poster: Wait, have I been asking the wrong questions and confusing things by using phrases like "morph" and "transformation" to describe characters' bodies changing onscreen, when I should have been asking about changing the parameters of the model? I don't need to do these transformations in one unbroken shot, it could be a series of shots showing different parts changing. So, is there a way to do a transformation that way, shot by shot, using consumer-level (hopefully non-Blender) software?
posted by Ursula Hitler at 9:09 PM on May 2

No, I understand what you're asking, and while "transformation" is used as technical jargon for squashing, stretching and skewing geometry, I'm talking about the kind of transformation I'm fairly certain you're talking about (i.e. change one thing into another). The problem you're running into a lot is that people are using the jargon-type of transformation when talking about features that 3D software supports, which is why seeing that in a list of features or in a menu in some software absolutely doesn't help you get towards your goal.

The model parameter changing stuff is also work that the model-maker needs to do, and while I understand that it seems analogous to what you want, it ultimately doesn't do what you are looking for. Under the covers, all that parameters do is change the positions of model geometry in a specific pre-determined way, and again, the model author has to do the work to allow that kind of manipulation in the first place.

Short answer, no, not as far as I'm aware.
posted by Aleyn at 9:53 PM on May 2

(That said, if the model does support changing parameters in a way that you want, you very likely can animate a change in parameters easily. I don't specifically know how to do that though.)
posted by Aleyn at 10:04 PM on May 2

In 3ds Max, there's a "Morph" modifier. You give it 2 models, and can move/animate a slider to go from one to the other smoothly.
BUT (big but): they have to have the same topologies, meaning the same faces connected the same way (regardless of their size and position).
The suggested way was to copy model A and stretch/rotate/etc it into shape B, that way they'd both have the same base topology.
There might be easier ways to do this, but I'm not aware of any.
posted by signal at 6:11 AM on May 3 [1 favorite]

You're basically asking why something that looks easy isn't super easy, and it's because it just isn't. 3D animation software is just mathy math stuff and it is a grind. Animation is an egregiously thankless job because people see it and think it has to be as fast and easy to make as it is to look at, but it's really, really not. You see character creation sliders and be like "okay THEY can animate this model from 0 (skinny) to 100 (fat) so I should be able to animate any model from 0 (skinny) to 100 (fat) by popping it into some automated thing" but no, you can't. You have to make both those models and you have to make them perfectly and they will probably break anyway because of a flipped normal or misaligned vertices or some other of the ten million ridiculous reasons 3D animation is such a grind and the Blender UI looks like all that, and then you have to figure out how to fix that and also hope you didn't break something else at the same time.

There's a morphing functionality like signal describes in Cinema 4D also, a program I'm really familiar with and is relatively easy to use, but the issue they describe is also the same. You need to know how to get the end states as what you want and yes, it's going to be SO much more annoying and fiddly and specific than what you're imagining.

The end goal of what you want is pretty clear but your questions reveal you really don't know anything about how 3D animation stuff works (which is fine and makes sense) but you really do need to know all that stuff if you want to do this.
posted by caitcadieux at 7:36 AM on May 3

"I just want to turn people into other people!" - that can be done by the 2D morphing programs like Fantamorph and WinMorph
posted by Sophont at 1:25 AM on May 5