Many of you might know the free fractal image generator for windows named Apophysis ( http://www.apophysis.org/ ), but have you tried doing videos with it?
You can do image sequences with Apophysis and another free application named Flam3 ( http://www.flam3.com/ ).
<edit> Oh yeah, I checked and Apophysis seems to be running fine on Linux under Wine and Flam3 has native support for Linux as well…
Here are two examples I just did with those programs (glow added in Blender video sequence editor). Click on the pictures to see the videos.
Blue ball - video size 480 KB
Ring of energy - video size 840 KB
Here is a quick tutorial how to use these programs…
1. Use Apophysis to create an interesting fractal image (you can preview the animation with the play button in the button bar). 2. Save the fractal parameters to a file <edit2> but don’t use spaces in the name, it will not work if you do. 3. Use Flam3 to make a series of images from that fractal file you just saved. 4. Import those images to Blender video sequence editor (or to any other software capable of compositing pictures to a video) and make the video.
Note! I did a .bat file to get the job done with the Flam3. Download it from here and place it in your Flam3 directory. Then name your Apophysis fractal file to myanim.flam3 and copy it into the Flam3 directory, then run this Run_myanim.bat to get the image sequence for the video. You can edit the .bat file to get the results you want.
PS. To modify the image size you have to edit the myanim.flam3. Modify the attribute size=“xxx xxx” for something like size=“800 600” to get the resolution you want.
I would like to see your animations… post them here.
Apophysis has this feature built in as a script that outputs frames. Works very well for me. Just make sure that the folder you are saving them to is already there or else the program will crash:)
@ Catboy85: Thanks, I had completely missed that, but there are some advantages using Flam3. Main advantages are that Flam3 supports motion blur (smoother images) and it supports transparent & non transparent PNG images (handy if you want to composite the image with something else) etc. some other advantages like support for threads.
Nevertheless this Apophysis animation rendering script can be handy too in places.
Here are couple more animations (these are just so much fun to do). I switched from XviD video codec to H.264 (for better quality and smaller sizes) so you need a proper codec or a VLC Media Player, GOM Player or KMPlayer(etc. player that has codecs integrated) to view these.
