How to map/morph one image completely into a new shape?

[pavinder]

Hi, I want to take a map of a country and change the shape of it to fit exactly into another complex shape (e.g. a puddle of water, an animal outline, etc).

To be clear, in doing this I don't simply want to mask the original map image to "cut out" the chosen shape, I need to keep the entire map and distort its shape into the new shape. I'm also not talking about using displacement maps to "wrap" the map around a second object. I guess it's a "shape morph" I'm after, which leaves all the original content and just changes the boundaries.

I know I could use the warp tool, but this requires an incredible amount of time to manually change images to exactly fit a new complex shape. It also means every time I want a new shape it has to be manually done. Given that the warp grid only has 9 squares, this makes it even more difficult to get a good match to the new shape.

Does anyone know of some way do what I need to automatically? For example to choose a few points on the original to map to chosen points on the second shape, such that the software will then interpolate the points in between. Thanks in advance for advice.

 

[Steve]

No way I can think of.
Warp and liquefy and lots of time.

 

[iDad]

like steve said but another thing is you'll need can do it at least once(lots of time) but you can record an action for use on the others

 

[pavinder]

Thanks for your replies.
It's unfortunate that there's no way for the software to do some of the work. The upside is it'll improve my warping skills.

The idea of making an action is a good one too, maybe not for this project (where I need to transform a variety of different shapes) but certainly for some of my other projects.

Thanks again.

 

[pavinder]

Seems from further research that a possible way to do things may be to use Illustrator to vectorize the images, then import them into Flash and use the "Shape Tween" function. Will give that a shot and see how it goes...

 

[pavinder]

A helpful person on another forum suggested the Mesh Warp in Illustrator. The grid in Photoshop only has 9 squares, which is why I was referring to a lack of precision. It seems the Illustrator mesh grid has far more precision. I haven't used Illustrator much at all in the past other than for importing photographs and using Live Trace. But the Mesh Warp tool might be just the ticket here. I also investigated the new Photoshop Puppet Warp tool in CS5, which is far superior to the standard warp options in Photoshop. It too looks like being a suitable way to tackle my challenge. With any such project there are bound to be personal interpretations in the final image. What I'm aiming for with my mapping is to have all the squares in the mesh fairly evenly warped. I want to avoid some sections being massively distorted while others remain hardly changed. It certainly will be my own interpretation but hopefully at the end people looking at the new map will instinctively know where they can find places relative to each other.

 

[Steve]

Let us know how you make out with Illustrator.