Technical stuff:
The actual morph is ages old, but I tarted it up a little with a body, scenery and some dramatic lighting.
In accordance with the old trick, the ambient light is blue, the directional light is orange. I knew that art school education would come in useful.
The only other light in the scene is for the flash as the guy is zapped. Splutterfish Rio ™ somehow manages to make everything look peachy with just one directional light.
The partical zap nearly killed my machine (something about having to calculate collision with a morphing, skinned mesh, pffft ;O), so I rendered them out separately as a matte and used video effects to beef them up and overlay them onto the finished animation.
Stuff that's missing - Any kind of facial animation (he doesn't even blink), the entire guy below the hips and feathers. I spent hours trying to get the fur system to do feathers, but it always come out looking more like a piñata. I guess ill have to save that effect for a piñata transformation. =OP

Typical that now the exact information would be helpful - I've gone and forgotton it.

There'a a particular MAX modifier that allows you to randomly spread instanced/referenced geometry along a mesh of one shape or another - People tend to use it to quickly knock up some grass (create maybe 4-5 differnt blades and then apply 4-5 copies of the modifier to the plane acting as the ground/earth)

Might be able to do the same thing with feathers, except I'm not sure how exactly it might work when it comes to 'combing' them all out and such. Maybe you could apply the modifier and then collapse the stacks, select by element and then just rotate them all (long as the pivot is right at the base of the feather) till they're all pointing into the right place.
Not much of a timesaver; but at least you won't have to place them all onto the head by hand.

hey this is really impressive it would be great to see more of this

Nice work there :) Despite the missing elements, it still shows that you're skilled at morphing.

Thats crazy awesome work there hun, nice job!

I'm looking forward to that piñata transformation now. :D

Heh heh, I was kidding!
Although come to think of it, Camroo probably wouldn't say no. =OP

Well consider it a nudge nudge from me too. ;)

Woo beautiful! More folks need to be turn into us squwacky feathery birds! ;)

my character is obsessed with turning people into birds himself ;)

https://www.raccoonboy.com/assets/parrot.jpg

Ooh, birdy has glowy shiny staff... shineee. =OD
Always a pleasure to help out the birdies...

So where is the full avi original? 8) <3

Funny you should mention that, I just got the webspace to host avi's today. Any preferences to codec, file size, etc?

Divx, Xvid, Quicktime-- anything's OK.. I don't even care about file size. Make it 20 megs or 30 megs, I'm OK :3 <3

Very cool indeed! Bravo! :D

Nifty to see the final product! Well done piece of work there :)

wow really realistic looking anatomy wise (even if it may not be for some things technically, I dunno, I'm not an expert on birdanatomy, but it really seems to work to me!) Nice job!

my word, its a bird.:)

good work I think. I'll be wanting to make things like this in the future (my gallery has a whole of two incomplete 3D models as "proof") I actually learned to draw in order to turn back and actually work on CG stuff like this. What else... hm. dunno. I'll keep an eye on you too, just in case. *watches with unblinking eyes ;)*

I like it, i want to see a full body version of this thing

Wow, fantastic piece of CGI, I thought the guy was real for a minute there. My only quibble - is that you have his beak growing out of his mouth, like his teeth are merging. A lot of bird TF's do that, but the idea of it always makes me gag, like having something stuck in your throat. (Plus I hear it's not scientifically accurate - bird beaks aren't analagous to mammal teeth.) But that's just my hang-up - it's a great TF.

Hurray bird tf :D

Fantastic detail!

heh, four years later and i'm still just as impressed by this thing now as I was then.

went back in time to look at faces. found this. I'm sure you hate it. i LOVE it! haha oh and looking for a back story? well i have this friend named Rio, now ;)