Andy Cocker - Tutorials - Flame Fractals

How To Make Animated Flame Fractals - A Tutorial

There's been a bit of interest in how I managed to make these flame fractal animations, so I've put together a quick mini-tutorial, which I hope will help.

What You Need

You'll need both Apophysis, for designing your flame fractals, and Flam3, for rendering your animations. That's all.

Design Your Flames

1. Install and start up Apophysis. Assuming you have a flame that you wish to animate (I'll not explain here how to create and design flames within Apophysis), save the flame parameters into a new .flame file. For example, 'MyFlame.flame'.
2. Design your second flame, and save those parameters into the same .flame file. Repeat this procedure until you have your desired number of flames. For our purposes, two flames is enough.

Let's Animate!

Prepare the Flame file

1. Install Flam3
2. Copy the MyFlame.flame file from your Apophysis directory in to your Flam3 directory.
3. We need to make some changes to the flame file. Open it up in a plain text editor (Notepad will do). You can see that each of our flames is represented by a self-contained section of code, starting with

   <flame

   and ending with

   </flame>

4. Make sure that you make the following changes to each of these flame sections!
5. Firstly we must change the dimensions of our rendered images to our desired output size. I want PAL resolution, so I change

   size="636 480"

   to

   size="720 576"

6. Next, make sure that these settings are as follows:

   oversample="4"
   filter="1"
   quality="50"
   brightness="4"
   gamma="1"
   

   and make sure you add

   batches="50"

   as well! This adds motion blur to your animation, making it look a lot smoother.

Create the sequence

1. Open a Command Prompt at the location of the Flam3 program.
2. Type the following commands, pressing ENTER after each:

   set sequence=MyFlame.flame
   set nframes=50
   flam3-genome > seq-MyFlame.flame
   

3. This should have created a new file called seq-MyFlame.flame. We told the program to rotate our first flame by 50 frames, then mutate into our second flame over 50 frames, and finally rotate our second flame for a further 50 frames.

Render the images

1. Lastly, we need to render out our images. Type the following code, again pressing ENTER after each line:

   set verbose=1
   set dtime=1
   set qs=10
   set format=jpg
   set begin=1
   flam3-animate < seq-MyFlame.flame

   This will render out a series of individual JPG images, which you can then assemble into an animation. You can use VirtualDub to do this, or if you just want to watch the series of images animated without assembling a movie, you can use Imagen.
   
   N.B. You can stop rendering at anytime with the key combination Ctrl-C. To start rendering the animation from where you left off, use

   set begin=n

   substituting 'n' with the frame number you wish to start from.

Conclusion

I hope this helps those of you having difficulty in animating flames created in Apophysis. I'm not an expert, and it's entirely possible that I'm not doing this correctly, but it worked for me.

For further information, please refer to the documentation that comes with both Apophysis and Flam3

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