I’ve been spending some time exploring the animation feature of Xenodream so I decided I would create seamless video loops at the same time and offer them with a Creative Commons License for my VJ and video friends.

This loop is the classic Z Plane at 4% transparency getting all crumpled up with the Styro metamorph at various settings. Much credit due to Panny Brawley for sharing her blooming shell XEP awhile ago which is at heart the inspiration for this animation. I still haven’t suceeded in matching the beauty of Blooming Shell however =)

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

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Rendering these animations is more or less a pot shot in the dark. Its very hard to tell what sort of motion an animation will have until after the last frame is finished rendering. This one looked great as a still but I was expecting a little more from it as animation (You’ve failed me ani.. im so disappointed in you) I may revisit this one in the future as I see some great potential here. - Let me know what you think. This one is a transparent Z plane twirling in on itself. Want the XEP files for this animation? here ya go.

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

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I’ve been spending some time exploring the animation feature of Xenodream so I decided I would create seamless video loops at the same time and offer them with a Creative Commons License for my VJ and video friends.

This loop is a Z Plane constructor with a Vortices metamorph on top of that. This is the second render I did of this because the first moved a little too fast for my tastes. I plan on exploring the Vortices Metamorph more in the future. To be kept up to date sign up for my rss feed or join the newsletter.

Download the movie file here This version was a little too intense for my tastes. This video file ends where it starts and loops seamlessly. Ive also looped it in the player below. Enjoy and leave comments below.

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

---

I’ve been spending some time exploring the animation feature of Xenodream so I decided I would create seamless video loops at the same time and offer these up with a Creative Commons License for my VJ and video friends.

This loop is a .balled constructor with a Holes-Z metamorph stacked on top and rendered with a 4% transparency. It’s my second attempt at rendering an animation with transparency which is trickier than it sounds. I haven’t seen any other transparent animations from the XD yahoo group so this might constitute the first Transparent 3D Fractal animation in the wilds of the internet. Three cheers for grasping at straws! The video below is looped. Enjoy and leave comments!

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

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AKA why does my animation look so bad?

Ive asked myself this question a couple times and decided to sit down and explain what I’ve come to understand to everyone else. For this article I’m going to use and animate the Orbital Fern 3d Fractal I created a while back - this article assumes you have a decent working understanding of Xenodream.

There are few things to know about Xenodream off the bat.

Most important is that it leaves the task of anti-aliasing to you. This can usually be accomplished by simply sizing down your image in any decent graphics program like photoshop. Below are two images from the same source file. The image on the left is the raw render at 1024×768 with all the aliased edges giving a very rough unpleasant feel to it. The one of the right was simply resized down to 800×600. I hope everyone agrees that the image on the right looks better, even though it is at a smaller resolution.

Now why is this? As far as why the program doesn’t anti-alias Garth (the programs creator) says on the discussion list that its largely a technical issue but the details are available in this post for those on the Xenodream pics yahoo mailing list.

As to why the smaller image with technically LESS detail ends up looking MORE detailed? It’s been explained much better elsewhere than I could ever hope to convey so I recommend you read this article on anti-aliasing (you can simply mouse-over to get the gist of it)

So with that in mind - if you are creating a Xenodream Animation and you aren’t taking this into account and outputting frames at the final end size of your project you will be creating another problem. There will be frame to frame aliasing as well which a good motion graphics editor should be able to fix, but simpler gif animation suites may not.

The end result will be that if your animation has any kind of small details it will probably sparkle, shift and jump in a bad way which will be totally distracting to the viewer. Digital Noise. The smaller you render your file the more noticable these artifacts will be.

Here is an example of a scaled down animation compared to an not scaled down animation at the same size Side by Side so you can see the differences - the jump in the middle of the file is some oddity with animating metamorphs.

So here are the quick simple steps I took to create the better of the two of these animations.

Step One

open up or create an XEP file. I chose my orbital ferns since I really like the detail in that one and wonder what it would look like in motion.

Step Two

Goto the animation tab and click on the first memory spot. I also changed some other values for these reasons:

Steps: aka frames. Most standard motion video uses 29.97 frames per second. Ive chosen 329 frames which will yeild roughly 10.97 seconds of footage

Apply Pits: this will remove any ‘pits’ from the image. (for example see the lighting window image below) A pit will show up on your render as a sort of square box. If you are getting pits the general solution is to render for a longer time. I changed this to 4 because it seems to get almost all the pits without effecting the image.

Apply Polish : This smooths out some of the rough edges and bumps but not to be confused as a replacement for anti-aliasing. Ive found this to work for some images and not well for others, play with this and see what looks best for your image.

3) Play with and tweak your fractal until you find the destination point and click the second box in the memory spot grid - I liked how this one looks.

4) Now goto the rendering tab and Ill show you the options I’ve adjusted for this animation as well as why.

terminate at: very important for batch renders. When rendering in chaos mode you’ll see a number counting down in the render tab, starting high and working its way lower - this essentially represents how rendered the image is; the lower the number the more rendered the image is. If you watch the number you’ll see that it jumps around but not randomly or wildly - It centers around an average. This is what what the terminate at field essentially deals with - telling the image when to stop rendering and move onto the next in the batch. As you will be dealing with a large number of images improper setting can have a large impact on the outcome - From unfinished frames or frames that take hours each.

If you do a test render at your desired size its smart to watch the numbers - I do this by working on the lighting preset while its rendering and clicking and dragging around inside the preview window of the lighting window. When all the pits are gone and the image doesn’t seem like its gaining any detail I take a mental note of the number in the render window.

Working this way I came to a really high number for this one 1124 (I usually terminate at 150) So this saves me a bunch of render time.

Render Size: I chose 1024×768 because I wanted to scale down to 800×600. This is where you over compensate. Just make sure you keep the same aspect ratio (1024×768 = 4:3 | 800×600 = 4:3)

5) Do a test render and adjust the lighting - I usually start a full scale render and watch the numbers as mentioned above in the terminate at: section. While doing this I tweak the lighting to my satisfaction. Another thing I always check for is by clicking the lights and checking that for all lights the smoothing and fringe values are set to zero. (below) I find that this adds extra lines around the details and if its not intentionally added it ends up looking sort of bad.

6) After this point you wont be able to change the lighting, opacity, or shadows so before you do this make sure you are satisfied. In the Animation tab hit ‘Create Batch’ and name your file. This will export all of the individual XEP files to a folder of your chosing with the name +0001-bat.xep

7) After you’ve set the directory where xd will place all of your rendered files via the Destination dialog below “Select Files”
Right next to the Create Batch is the Batch render button - you can load all the xeps you just exported and start the rendering process.

string them all together in a motion graphics program - I use after effects to import the JPG sequence and then export as a mov file using the sorensen3 codec at 98% quality

Below is the finished animation

This tutorial is by no means comprehensive and there are many options Ive left out which are useful to creating animations. Feel free to leave comments with any tips you’ve found and would like to share or questions.

This is the Biomorphica video of my friend Steven Nalepas‘ Durian remix of Saple by Mileece. I was fortunate enough to see the full resolution video and it blows this web preview out of the water. Howver the online version of the video is nonetheless very captivating and beautiful. The DVD is due to be released in Feb on Native State Records. It will only be a 1000 limited edition run so stay tuned if you want one.

View the video here

This animation represents a labor of love and of enduring patience which pushed my two computers to the limits of their computational abilities for six months (they haven’t forgiven me quite yet). We were going to sell it on Native State Digital as a music video and in a fit of altruistic goodness usually reserved for folks on NPR we decided to give it away as a gift and ask for donations. So if this video touches something in you, if you think the effort is a step in the right direction away from the standard “pay to play” model consider making a donation of any amount. - Video & downloads below as well as some information on how the video came to be.

Download Compressed MP4

(353×240, 48 mb, zipped)

download full resolution

(280mb, .mov, 600×400, zipped)

Some words about the creation of this

I believe this to be the first of its kind (animated 3d IFS fractal) as the animation functionality was a feature request of mine made to Garth Thornton of Xenodream who was so kind as to implement it and make some incredible improvements upon the idea.

Through the course of the video you will see a wide variety of intentionally organic shapes which I wanted to set it to appropriate music. Rena Jones’ album Driftwood is a collection of sonic snapshots into the energy cycle of a tree from seed to driftwood washing up on a beach and everything in between, before and after. I took the concept a step further at the end and integrated my best attempt at minerals which is plant food! below are some raw uncolored stills before I colored and added them to the video.

The wide variety of organic forms resulting from relatively simple configuration of iterative functions illustrates the concept that complex results can arise from simple conditions. It is my belief that nature expresses itself on every level through fractals, limits, feedback loops, and iterative functions.

Video Stats:

Each frame took on average 15 minutes to render. The total frame count is over 15,000 (this includes sequences that were scrapped) It is estimated this animation took 2,750 hours of render time (114 days). Thank god I have several computers. However the overall scope of the project took over 6 months to complete.

From Rena Jones regarding her album:

“Driftwood is an album designed to tell the story of a tree’s life cycle. Each movement or song represents a stage in a tree’s life cycle.
I wanted the listener to be able to be taken into that world and be able to feel moments of life budding and growing and dieing and traveling across the sea only to be washed up and spring forth new life.”

Learn more about…

phidelity - the creator of this video

Rena Jones - the musician featured in this video

Garth Thornton - the creator of xenodream

Phidelity is the moniker of Kris Northern who peers deep into iterative structures, feedback loops and recursive structures to find new elements to add to his tool box for creating art and music that ex. There is plenty more on www.phidelity.com

Xenodream is a PC based 3d fractal object exploration software package. This animation represents the very groundfloor of what the software is capable of. It is simply put one object moving around two IFS (Iterative Function Set) vortices. Everything that happens in the video is still just that one object. Just think copies of copies.

They have just released version 2 of the software and I recommend checking out the website
http://xenodream.com/

I just stumbled upon a Zueuks page on deviantart who has a hack for apophysis which is the editor used to make fractal flames for the electric sheep screensaver. This hack allows for 3d fractal flames and boy are they GORGEOUS!

Want to play? here is apophysis The image above was created for the most part from tweaking Zueuks parameters from one of his 3d fractals and I can’t take any credit for it other than coloring, tweaking and rendering.