Caricature challenge

[Terry Vogelaar]

Hi there,

It has been a while since my last post, but I still a RunRev fan.

My other passion is painting. And I get a lot of requests for  
caricatures lately. With familiar faces it is easy to see what is less  
perfect. But it is really hard to analyse a face if I only have one  
photo and I never seen the person in real life.

So my plan is to do an analysis with the help of my computer to see  
what the ugly sides are to emphasise those.

Marquardt has made a mask to apply to a frontal picture of a face. The  
better the mask fits, the more beautiful a face is. Read all about it  
on http://www.beautyanalysis.com if you're interested.

So I want to make a program that imports a picture and puts some key  
points of Marquardts mask on top of it. Those points can be dragged to  
a position to match the picture better. It then calculates the  
difference between where it is and where it should be, in order to  
multiply the difference.

So far this is all easily doable with RunRev. But here comes the  
challenge. It should slice up the picture in triangles or rectangles  
and distort them. Is this possible in RunRev?

If not, is the data exportable to any other program that can do this?  
I know PhotoShop has an ability 'liquify' an image. This filter can  
handle exported liquify meshes. But the contend of such a mesh is not  
readable by humans.

Volker Blanz and Thomas Vetter made a computer program to do that (and  
much more) in 3D. Too bad it is not for sale. But it proves  
caricatures can be generated by a computer. See http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~blanz/movies/siggraph99.mpg 
  - the part between 0:54 and 1:10 min. But that program is way more  
than what I want to accomplish. If I just can slice up a 2D image and  
distort each part programmatically, I would be totally happy.

Any suggestions on how to distort an image with RunRev?

Terry