3D morphing for winning in chess
Movie
We produced the animated movie 3D morphing for winning in chess
to explain the concept of 3D morphing,
and demonstrate 3D morphing sequences produced by the
Underground system.
We apply 3D morphing mostly to chess pieces. Naturally the movie
contains a lot of explanations about 3D morphing and chess, but
aims to be entertaining even for those who are not interested in these
subjects. The main theme of the movie is using 3D morphing for
changing chess pieces in the middle of the game, to throw the opponent
off balance.
The movie explains that 3D morphing can ease some of the problems
that chess players encounter- changing one piece into another at the right
moment can change the balance of the game. Of course this has to happen
without being noticed by the opponent. This puts a few limitations on
using this helpful tool in the game. The most important limitation is
that it can't happen many times in the same game- one or two morhped
pieces are risky enough.
Such a drastic change has to be
gradual, and 3D morphing is perfect for that.
If the morph happens away from the center of the
opponent's attention, it's possible that he will not notice,
and find he's in trouble only when it's too late...
Thus the movie suggests a helpful technique-
surprising moves that divert the attention of the
opponent from the changes which morphing makes in the position.
If you wait for the end of the movie (original version), you can
see how using 3D morphing in chess can become dangerous.
You can't be serious...
The movie isn't completely serious, since it aims to be entertaining
even for those who aren't experts in animation, 3D morphing, or chess.
If you have no sense of humor, and find that the underlying theme
(or any other concept) makes little sense, you're probably right.
If that stops you from enjoying the movie... forget it.
Downloading the Movie
There are a few options to see the movie.
What you can see in the movie
There are many morphing sequences in the movie. Each one is
a direct output of the underground system. No manual
manipulations were performed on the bodies produced by
the system. The bodies that you see are exactly what the
user of the underground system gets.
In order to convince yourself that we used 3D morphing for the movie,
rather than 2D morphing, look for sequences involving movement of the
piece that goes through morphing, or moevment of the camera (the
point from which the scene is seen) while viewing such a piece.
Such sequences are difficult to produce with 2D tools alone.
Even if they could be produced this way, they would look completely
different from the 3D sequences you can
see in the movie, not to mention much less realistic.
Pay attention to the fitting of features between different
pieces, which is an important feature of the underground system.
The Underground system is fairly easy to use. The last sequences
that we made for the movie, took less than an hour to make,
including several attempts at fitting different parts together,
and following each attempt 1-2 minutes of computation. We assume
that with a complete system, an experienced animator using a
powerful computer will be able to produce morphing sequences,
such as those in the movie "Terminator 2", in a day.
The making of the movie
The modelling was done through the standard use of a modeller.
The only exceptional feature of the movie are morphing sequences.
All of the sequences were made by refining the vertex sets of
existing bodies with the underground system.
A careful viewing of the movie will quickly convince you that
the morphing we did involved modelling work, since it couldn't
be achieved with 2D morphing (morphing of images).
No work was involved other than the modelling
with a modeller for animation, importing bodies into the underground
system, and exporting refined bodies from the underground
system for using in the modeller.
