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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6001399249367017753

just for fun ...

Just for fun?  ???

That's Excelent and very beautiful!
Nicely done!

Beautiful dancers!

Excellent animation - would be good to see that at DVD quality.

Thanks for the comments! I rendered this in 800x600px but in order to see it full size you have to download the file from google video because the flash version is really small. For DVD quality I probably need to buy another computer, because on my Atholon 3000+ PC it took ~3 days to produce all the 900 frames for this animation and in the meantime the machine was nearly unusable for other tasks :)

Excellent animation Stefan - was it Xenodream or your own custom software ?

david, it's xeno - can tell from the transitions and overall appearance.

stefan, the animation is very interesting and those morph keys are well chosen! buy a dualcore or quadcore machine and make more :D

Thanks for the advice, lycium. In fact I intend to organize a rendering farm with ~500 quadcore machines and produce full time animated movies. I just need a sponsor for that ... :D

BTW: I forgot to mention - you are right, the animation has been made with an intermediate beta of Xeno Dream where a new animation feature is available. I made it in order to test the interpolation of shape parameters and the batch rendering option. In my view XD contains a huge potential for really crazy animations.

that makes two of us! i'd like to render something like http://www.fractographer.com/wip/adits_final.png at 1920x1080 (highest possible hd resolution) in an animation, of course containing many different kinds of 3d fractals, responding to music. i'm sure that could be sold, and well, just need a sponsor for that cluster.

in my case from back-of-the-envelope estimates, i think "just" 4 quadcore machines, each with 2gb of ram, would be enough to get the ball rolling.


xeno seems to have an inescapable "look" to it ;)


all fractal apps do actually, and this is unfortunately rarely explored, even in the 2d case!!! i have some older ones online here btw: http://www.fractographer.com/wip

sorry if this reply is a little rushed, there's (another) thunderstorm coming and everything needs to be shut down :(

Well, you make me optimistic; I thought this type of production is hard or impossible to sell. If there is a market for such videos, then I'm really interested and start looking for investors ;)

(thunderstorm passed with not a bang but a whimper)


that basically puts us in the same market as the biocursion dvd; i was thinking earlier if their revenue is enough to support such an endeavour, strings could be pulled and some hd-dvd / blu-ray fractal animation discs could be produced. i'm sure someone will be interested in bundling such a disc with such a hd video player to show off its quality potential, and if it's done right the thing could be turned into a nicely cyclic/randomised display for parties or so - kinda like scott draves' "dreams in high fidelity" project (which isn't done at 1080p hd res iirc).

going further, i've been thinking a lot about achieving realtime rendering of these 3d fractals using the latest generation of gpus (http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q4/geforce-8800/index.x?pg=1 - mine should be arriving tomorrow); they have a great mix of general purpose and graphics-specific computational power that makes them ideal for the task. what's more, they are on an incredibly fast computational growth curve ("moore's law cubed" as nvidia coins it) and several gpus can be used in parallel. i'm doubtful that full hd resolution 3d fractals of the sort i showed previously can be done in realtime on a single g80, but perhaps with two of the next generation ones (which will be integrated into the cpu most likely, thanks to amd/ati teaming up) will be enough.

the remaining problems are only that of engineering a ridiculously efficient rendering scheme* that can be mapped to gpus, finding good music and convincing a sponsor that the 4 g80 cards are not, in fact, for gaming! ;)


* halfway there on that one, just need to map it to the gpu in a way that doesn't lean on the cpu so much. using a single 2.5ghz thread of execution that image i linked, which is 542 megapixels big at its full size (29310x18510 resolution), took just under a day to compute - and that's going way over the quality requirements for an animation where 5x5 supersampling already looks completely awesome. this is somewhat complicated by the need for temporal antialiasing (motion blur), which will increase the antialiasing quality but also take much longer - i'd say a day per frame per 2.5ghz core with outrageously high quality rendering at hd resolution isn't so bad though, and bodes well for a gpu implementation. those new intel chips (c2d) are a lot faster than my athlon x2 in several key areas and also support 64bit, which is totally necessary for my app; i can still do low level sse optimisation to get a 2-3x performance increase, also. shit now i've typed way too much again...

You rise lots of technical issues here and I don't feel competent enough in that area. My feeling is that the main problem is the software, because not too many people today are involved in writing fractal software.