As we continue our intrepid safari into the deep, dark jungle of character animation, we're going to transition from the modeling issues outlined in part one of our series to some relatively simple techniques you can use to make your usually inanimate objects anthropomorphic. And while we're on the subject of words that contain the term "morph" in them, now's as good a time as any to reveal today's featured technique: morph targets.

You may or may not have noticed that Macromedia.com has undergone a major redesign recently, one that assigns at least some reality to Macromedia's vision of rich internet applications (or RIAs) being the future of web design and development. But after examining the parts of the site that best exhibit Macromedia's direction, one can't help but ponder what the ultimate value is for web users.

"Three-dimensional character animation." A phrase that not only rolls right off the tongue, but, more importantly, conjures images of fantastical photorealistic beasts thundering their way across a silver screen near you. The flip side is that the same phrase, for many creative professionals, introduces a sometimes convoluted world of concepts like inverse kinematics, weight mapping, phenomes, NURBS, and so on. But fret not. Using tools present in most major 3D animation software and some simple objects and techniques, you too can begin to incorporate 3D character animation into your projects.

In the first installment of our series on migrating from After Effects to Combustion, we looked at converting Illustrator artwork into Combustion Paint objects, a process which, for some of our readers, may very well have fallen somewhere between paper cut and root canal on the pain scale. This time we're going to go a little easier on you, as we explore how well Combustion works with native Photoshop files.