I'm working on a new creative animation tool for algorithmic and fractal artists named
Artificator. The application combines a number of elements that I haven't seen in other fractal software, and I'd like to hear your opinion on whether this kind of software would be of any use to you.
The application combines the following components for creating animations:
Brushes - user paints colors on the screen with mouse cursor
Background flow field - the brush strokes flow around and fade away on the background based on the flow field settings
Colors - user can adjust background and brush colors. Optionally user can also enable a Nova Ducky Julia fractal that can be set up to interact with brush strokes as well (other fractals can be added later).
Brushes, flow field, colors and fractal have a number of properties that the user can adjust with sliders on the screen. There's a
playable demo here that shows you how this works.
With the upcoming editor application based on this concept, all brush strokes and slider adjustments can be recorded, replayed and looped. User can also pick a soundtrack and synchronize the recorded loops to the bpm of the music, thus making the creation of accurately timed music videos a breeze.
This tool evolved to resolve the limitations and difficulties I had in making animations with Ultra Fractal. The editor provides immediate feedback and animation preview for adjusting the various graphics properties. Also rendering times for videos are reasonable - eg. a 4-minute animation at 1080p took about an hour to render and encode to H.264 (and this could be improved further).
I've had a lot of fun with the prototype and it has enabled a faster, more intuitive workflow than any other animation software I've used for algorithmic animations. See
these animations to get an idea of what I've done with it.
I've received mixed feedback about the application and I'm undecided whether this is a software worth developing further. It could be the case that people just haven't figured yet how totally awesome and unique this workflow is, or maybe it's just me unable to see that it isn't. To widen my perspective I'd like to hear what you think. If you've worked with fractal animations in the past, please share your opinions on this thread. A public beta is intended to begin around August should I decide to continue the project – more info on that later.