Continuing to have a great time in the Working With Ultra Fractal class! This has really helped expand my style; I finally am producing images that have some subtlety to them. I’ve got a long ways to go before I get to the superstar level, but at least I don’t suck any more.

Week 4 had us studying a coloring algorithm I’d never had any luck with: Rose Range Lite. I’d tried it a few times and produced nothing interesting, leading to a complete abandonment of it in favor of easier results elsewhere. My first dozen homework images also sucked, and I was concerned I was getting nowhere. Finally, stuff clicked and I produced what I think is a pretty hip image. I turned it into another little artistic movie study:

Orca Rose

1280×720 still image of Orca Rose

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Low: 8 MB
Med: 24 MB
High: 268 MB

The music is …

I’ve completed my first artistic study. Unlike my technical studies (see also completed Study #1, Study #4), I don’t have a pre-planned agenda — I’m just playing around with small, bite-sized pieces to see what I can do.

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Low: 4.4 MB
Med: 9.4 MB
High: 162 MB

This study extends one of my still images from week 3 of the “Working With Ultra Fractal” class. In it, I had used textural layering techniques to create an interesting rusty-metal look. This study animates most of those layers, but in a loosely coupled way instead of rigidly creating a single image. It gives the movie a neat “flying” feeling. This inspired the music, which played up on that feeling rather than my original “corroded” concept of the still image.

Nitty gritty and technical mumbo-jumbo

This study was actually fun to do, as opposed to my technical ones that have been routinely exasperating. …

I’m currently enrolled in “Working With Ultra Fractal” from the Visual Arts Academy. It’s taught by Janet Parke, whom I consider to be one of the best fractal artists on the planet. It was her work that inspired me to get back into fractals after a decade off, so it’s a real privilege to be able to learn from her.

We’ve done the first three lessons, and even though I started making fractals in 1989, I have learned a lot. The first two lessons focused on really getting familiar with the Mandelbrot (and its Julia sets). Although I thought I already knew about things like the Seahorse and Elephant valleys, there’s a lot of subtleties I’d never picked up on. Even little stuff like reliably finding mini-mandelbrots — it was hit or miss for me up until I went through the lesson. Now I can spot one a …

Throughput Requirements

How big is this thing, and how fast do we have to go?

I want to produce a 60 to 120 minute film. At 30 frames per second, we’ve got an average of

90 minutes * 60 seconds per minute * 30 frames per second = 162,000 frames

Ah, but that’s just one layer, and assumes that I have a 100% utilization rate on what I render to what eventually gets used. Although I can easily see fractals using a dozen or more layers to produce really cool, subtle things, it’s one of those utilization curves that says most of the bang for buck can be achieved with the first handful of layers. Let’s imagine an average of 4 or 5 layers, and then we have to add a fudge factor to account for extra frames that get left on the cutting room floor:

162,000 frames * 5 layers per final frame * …

Woof, this was hard, but is done enough.

Talk about frustrations! This is what proofs of concept are all about, after all, but still, one would hope for somewhat easier going. I learned a lot. I think the output is also kind of neat, although the technical execution isn’t up to the standards I see in my mind’s eye. I’m sure the finished movie will have the same lament!

First, the result. Purpose: synchronize audio to the fractal. Done, April 16 2007 — see the thin orbit traps wriggle with the bass, and the lead part make a layer get more visible. Part of Study #5 in here as well: hand-keyframing large scale fractal parameters to the music. What a pain in the ass. Here it is:

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Ok, here’s the nitty gritty for those fellow explorers in this bizarre corner of the creative universe.

Rendering

This is a one minute video, and due to …

Duh. A bad case of delayed intelligence here.

FinalCut can composite images too, and has almost all of UltraFractal’s merge modes with a 1:1 correspondence. It was a simple matter to bring in the three Tendrillon layers and merge them with “Multiply” and “Difference” to get the exact look of the original UF image.

FinalCut can do a fair number of compositing tricks, including blurs and whatnot, so I think I can simply do the bulk of the compositing work in it, saving Shake for special stuff like warping a layer, faking camera shake, or complex animations. That said, I’ve also found that the “MultiLayer” node in Shake has all the right merge modes and generally gives identical results too… although there are a few head-scratchers sometimes.

Now I have to figure out how to do more complex timeline stuff in FinalCut… sigh, yet another tool to learn. I’m really interested …

So far, so good. Shake composites the individual layers very well for straightforward merge modes (add, multiply, etc). Some of the modes in UF seem to be non-reproducible in Shake. For example, “Difference” would appear to be equivalent to ISubA (Subtract, but take the absolute value) yet the visual discrepancy is obvious.

[Update: see my entry on FinalCut compositing that solves this problem.]

I’m excited by the results. The ability to change parameters in merging layers in Shake is huge — it’s way faster to to these things (both in terms of composition as well as rendering) in Shake than in UltraFractal. It also sets me up to do Study #4 (changing the Shake parameters in time with the music) in a very powerful way that would be difficult and time consuming to do directly in UF.

This makes me more committed to leveraging UF as a composition tool, but leaving all …

Most settings don’t produce smooth results. Particularly with magnification, all sorts of bad things happen. I’ll post movies of all results soon. My methodology is:

• Create a 100 frame movie
• Create keyframes at 1, 40, and 100
• Start with default at frame 1; mild change of parameter at frame 40; large change of parameter at 100
• Modify keyframe curve types (straight or curved interpolations) at each of 1, 40, and 100. Save UPR for variation. Render movie.

Most of the time, you’ll see the transition, which is rarely desirable. You either want smooth, or discontinuous. I can hardly think of a time where you want continuous but with an obvious transition.

I’m still rendering test cases.

I’m approaching the movie itself with preliminary POC (Proof Of Concept) steps. These will expose issues that need to be solved and refine processes to be efficient. I’ve completed the first POC, which has helped refine my ideas for what needs to come next. Current thinking, starting from first POC, is:

Study #1 - “Test the pipeline”

Use all significant technologies in the production pipeline to create a short demonstration movie.

Status: Complete 03/26/2007. Read Details.

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Requirements include:

• Multilayered Ultra Fractal zoom, with varying rates and camera movements, gradient shifts, and layer replacement
• Network rendering from UF
• Compositing in Shake
• Music production in Logic
• Titles and final assembly in Final Cut
• Media output in Quicktime Pro

Study #2 - “Smooth the camera”

The first study exposed significant challenges with the camera movements. In my mind’s eye I see smooth transitions, but instead I got visible jarring when transitioning between keyframes. Camera movement is …