volume morphing quick and dirty!
 

I have a need to do some volume morphing but I need to get something very quickly to show it can be done.

Are there any packages designed to help with this process?

The idea is to model a childs face (my niece is going to be the test subject) and then morph it to an animal head like a koala bear or cheetah or something. The morph is not intended to be complete. Only far enough that you can recognize the animal and it has the facial characteristics of the child.

Ideally I would like to be able to take pictures of the subject and convert those to a 3D poly cage and then morph that cage to one of several types of animal cages.

I have been researching this for weeks and I keep running up dead ends.

At this point I have found a research paper dated 1998 that is exactly the kind of thing I want to do but it does not detail any software, it just talks about the concepts.

I was thinking stratus foto to quickly build the subject (child's head) cage and then another package from headus that takes to poly cages with differing topologies and somehow aligns them so that a morph can be made between them.

What I have done to show the possible results is to take a target cage of a koala bear and then just remodeled that cage using maya to make it resemble the subject (my niece) and then did a blend shape between them. The process took me two weeks and that is to long a cycle for what I need.

Can anyone give me any suggestions?