Questions
OneOfTheSixBillion
searched and can't find anything about how to use it. I've figured
out how to make beautiful individual images. I don't know how to use
the scripts to make animations. Could you help me or point me to
somewhere to learn how to make animations?
David Bitseff
There are several example scripts in the scripts directory [1] that you can
try. You might want to start with the rotate-palette.lua. This script simply
re-indexes the colors in the palette before rendering at each iteration. It
can give a nice animation effect of the colors in some flam3 images.
The sheep-loop.lua script allows you to preview the animation sequence that
will be used to create a sheep from your flam3 image if you choose to upload
it to the electricsheep server. It rotates all triangles that have a symmetry
of zero around the origin, so you need at least one triangle with a symmetry
setting of 0.0 (in the Colors widget) for the script to animate.
Something to keep it mind when animating in real time using scripts is that
the image quality is directly related to the animation speed. If it's
animating too slow then choose a lower image quality, and if it's going too
fast you can increase the image quality settings to slow things down. You can
make these adjustments while the script is running if you like.
Creating a movie of your animation is a little more work. There is currently
no direct support for creating movies from Qosmic. You will need to render
each frame of the animation to a png image file, and then use another tool
like mplayer/mencoder to combine the png images into a movie. The sheep-loop-
to-png.lua script shows how the png image files can be created for the sheep
loop. You can then use mencoder to create an avi movie with a command like:
mencoder "mf://*.png" -o output.avi -ovc lavc
If you are interested in modifying the scripts or writing your own then the
README-LUA file in the source archive gives some initial guidance and
describes the functions that are available.