Morphing

Morphing makes the clock appear to melt.

Morphing is a term derived from metamorphosis, which means to change physical shape or form.

The purpose of the morph object in 3ds max is to create an animated object that changes shape by morphing between two or more objects. Although it appears that a single object is changing form, in reality the morphing process translates the position of the vertices from their arrangement in one object to the arrangement in another, relative to their local coordinate system.

Consequently, all objects chosen to make up a morph object must have the same number of vertices. Typically, you achieve this by cloning an object, and then altering the geometry of the clones without changing their vertex count.