Animating Flames from Apophysis
This tutorial will show you how to make rendered animation in Apophysis. It assumes you already know the fundamentals, including how to use scripts. You can learn about the basics of Apophysis here and find more resource links here.
Preparing the Animation
The basic idea is to make a series of flames that will appear in sequence in the Title window (the list of flames on the left side of the main UI). These will become the keyframes in your animation. The animation will morph between these flames, in order from top to bottom. You can use any flames you want, even a randomized batch. But that will make an animation that looks very out of control and probably is not what you want. It's much better to find a flame that you like, and morph a few parameters a little at a time, and build coherent motion. Perhpas the best way to start is to select a Flame that you like in the Titile window and then choose Save Parameters <ctrl-s>. In the dialogue box that pops up, put the name of your flame in the File Name field, and in the Title field, paste the same name (without the path) and append a number, like "_01".
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After you have saved it, then open the file you just saved. Now that we have our initial image in a clean flame file, we can start evolving it into an animation. Begin by changing some parameters, such a s transforms or Variation parameters. I suggest using the transform editor rather than the mutation editor, so that the changes are not too extreme.
After you have made your modifications and a you are happy with the next keyframe, choose Save Parameters <ctrl-s>. Keep the same name in the File Name field, but in the Title Field, use the same name, but increment the number at the end. This will append your new flame to the end of the Title window and also to the end of your flame file.
PREVIEW
Now we have 2 keyframes of your growing animation. At this point you might want to preview the animation. To do so, download the script tw_morphPrvRen. Choose option 1 to view a preview. Hit <esc> to stop. If you'd like the preview to play faster or slower, simply open the script editor window, and edit the vaule for KeyDuration := 100; line 14 in the script. The higher the number, the slower the playback. To make more keyframes, you simply repeat the previous steps, making changes to the flame, using <Save Parameters> and incrementing the name in the title field.
One thing to note: the preview will not work with 1) post xforms 2) some animated variables such as julianPower 3) some variations might fail. The only way to deal with this is to make quick renders (see below) and compile in After Effects to see what you get.
Changing the Order of Flames in the Title Window
Since the order of the flames in the title window determined how the animation plays, you may be wondering, "how do I change the order of the flames in the Titie Window?" I know of only 2 ways to do this.:
1) open up the .flame file in a text editor, and copy and paste the flames to reflect the order that you want.
<flame name="Arrow_01".....params....yada yada....</flame>
<flame name="Arrow_02".....params....yada yada....</flame>
Move the flames around as you like. You can also change the names to reflect the new order.
Open that file up in Apophysis.
2) Use Save Parameters <ctrl-s>. When you select a flame in the title window, and then choose Save Params, it saves the flame file, and places the selected flame at the bottom of the title window. In this way you can reorder your flames. With practice, this gets quicker and is not so bad. Hopefully in future versions of Apophysis, they will implement reordering of flames in the title window.
RENDERING
There are a few different ways to animate flames. The best way is to use Exper's excellent rendering script RenderFlam3_Step . (you can also find this in the wiki). The script allows you to render the sequence out using flam3 as the renderer, written by Scott Draves (aka Spot). Flam3 is a stand alone rendering app. As of this writing, it is the only way to render morphing animation. Other benefits of using flam3 include: 1)motion blur in animation 2)bezier interpolation between keyframes (more on this below), 3) uses less Ram than the Apophysis renderer (which does not support animation) 4) you can continue to use Apo while flam3 is rendering. Flam3 is written for Linux and Windows, and there is a Mac port, but I have no experience with it. Download the windows version here. Once you have downloaded the zip file, extract it to c:\flam3. Then create a folder c:\flam3\anims. After you run the script, you will have a .flame and a .bat file in c:\flam3\anims.
Simply doubleclick the .bat file and the rendering will begin. The flames will go in the same location by default, but you can change that in the dialogue boxes that appear when you run the script.
INTERPOLATION
Exper's excellent script automatically chooses bezier interpolation. No need to hack the flame files any longer. THANK YOU EPXER!!!!! It also allows fine control over the render parameters in flam3. Look inside the script for more help on how to use it.
MOTION BLUR
Flam3 supports motion blur, by using the attribute"temporal_samples". You must edit the flame file and insert this attibute into every flame you want to have motion blur.
Setting temporal_samples="10" makes the flame be rendered 10 times, each
at a slightly different time, and averages the results together. Any parts of the flame that are in
motion will be blurred.
CONCLUSION
This should be enough to get you started animating flames. If you have any comments about this tutorial or if you make a cool flame animation and feel like sharing the joy, feel free to contact me. t (at) biomorphica (dot) com.
I created a 5 minute music video called Durian, using this technique combined with 3d animation.
happy flaming