Help! I'm being turned into some evil battle-ready General type!
Above is my first attempt at animated morphing (or indeed any type of animation). The morph is not that time-consuming to create, the hardest bit is the actually working out the process in the first place. I haven't perfected it yet.
Process
For a quick, low storage capacity morph I did the following.
1. Get photos or good drawings of the start/ end subjects;
2. Use a scanner to create jpeg or gif files out of them;
3. Use a photo paint package to resize the images/ get compatible colour pallettes (the process was simplified for me by using a photo paint transformation effect on the first image to get the second);
4. Simplify the images down to a number of objects (ie filled areas bounded by lines and curves, 31 here) using a trace package;
5. Use an art package incorporating "object blend" to generate the intermediate stages between the two images (in my case 30 frames);
6. Save each frame separately as a gif file, then load into a gif animation constructor. Set frame speed and save. My anim file is about 43kb, not at all bad.
7. FTP to your site and specify the file as you would a gif image. Most Internet browsers support animations in this gif format.
Software
Steps 2 and 3: whatever you have
Step 4: Corel Trace
Step 5: Corel Draw
Step 6: GIF Construction Set Professional, Alchemy Mindworks Inc.
Problems
What I have done looks OK, but you probably noticed that objects in the upper half of the anim go pretty much their own way. An ideal morph has eyes going to eyes, hair going to hair etc. between start and end images. This has to be fixed as such, because the blend command just pairs up start/end objects as it wants.
My original image (traced photo of me) has both eyes and some hair linked up as one object; obviously this is a bad start.
As for proper photo-morphing packages, have you seen how much memory they require? Usually CD-Roms are involved.