when you copy paste path's from illustrator (or photoshop) - they will always be centered and will disregard the location. you can manually drag the path into place or use overlord extension (if you are dealing a lot with Ai-Ae, I suggest you invest in it - it is great) as for design principles pre-morphing - as you wrote, get the direction right, use the first vertex, this will help you in many cases, but in other cases like @Mylenium said you will have to be creative. here's me being "creative": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C60GId1GwYQ&ab sorry for the hebrew text, but you can figure things out by the procedures I do there. I am basically doing the morphing manually by looking at a locked reference, and for it to be exact I will use an alpha matte so it will be cut on top to be absolutely correct. for less complex shapes the process is easier. it really depends what you are morphing
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