Animation is a multi-step process that can be done using Fractorium or the command line tools. It is the most complex portion of the program so you can safely ignore this portion if you are only interested in creating still images.
The major steps for creating an animation are:
- Create a few flames and place them in a single file. These will act as keyframes in the animation.
- Use either EmberGenome or Fractorium to create a sequence from that file. The sequence is the original keyframes plus all of the flames that result from blending them together.
- Use either EmberAnimate or Fractorium to render every frame in the animation using motion blur with temporal samples.
This three step process ends up blending the frames twice. The first blend is done in step 2 when the sequence is generated. The second blend is done in step 3 when performing animation rendering, because each of the sequence frames are further blended together using the temporal samples parameter.
When animating, various considerations about the animation include:
- How many keyframes it will use.
- How visually appealing the keyframes appear when blending from one to the next.
- How many blended frames will be between each keyframe.
- Whether the keyframes themselves will rotate as part of the animation.
- How many blended frames each rotation will consist of.
- The types of interpolation filters used when creating the sequence.
- The number of temporal samples, and the size and type of the temporal filter used when rendering the animation.
The articles under this section will help clarify these points and offer advice on how to use them.