Welcome to Fractal Forums

Howdy,

I'm enjoying the heck out of r0.97 -- good stuff!  What's got me a little stumped is an animation I've got generating.  It's been going for a while, so I finally decided to check on the progress in the output directory.  Of the 950 images generated, I'd say 90% of them are "on path," meaning following a smooth progression.  Every so often, after ~540 frames and then again at around 630, each for about 10 to 15 frames, are beautiful but *random* images that don't follow the path.  They seem to be *near* the path, but not on it...  I've got 26 keyframes, with 180 frames in between, so it's got a ways to go.

I was mainly wondering if there was any particular file that would shed some light that I could either attach or be pointed towards to look at settings to see what is going on.

Thanks in advance for any help/info/suggestions.  Also, thank you, Buddhi, for turning out a superb and fascinating program; awesome job!

Peace,

Phil

i second that.

i think it would be awesome to have an option called "log frames of an animation" that would work as follows:
if log=off then everything as usual.
if log=on then there could be some directory "logs" or "logfiles" or so that would contain the files logframe00001.fract, .... logframe12345.fract
- each logframe file matching exactly each frame of an animation.
(i.e. *after* calculating splines)

so, we could analyze not just the 26 keyframes, but all thousands of individual frames.

now...

if there would be another option on the animation-tab, that would say:
"generate animation from logfiles" - now THIS would be incredibly awesome!!!

because then we could change the fract-files of individual frames of a long animation without having to play around with keyframes/splines/etc.

this "generate animation from logfiles" should work quite similar to the "render from keyfiles"-button, just with "frames per key" set to 1... and the fract files taken from the logfile-directory.

buddhi: this would be my wish for christmas, but unfortunately christmas is over... ;-)

phil: you know you can do all of this yourself, dont you? buddhi's program is awesomely written and offers the choice of being batch-started. all you need to do is write a small script, that inputs the keyframe-files, calculate any kind of spline-path yourself and log the intermediate frames to your own logframes.fract files. should be no big deal if you are a little into programming and gives you great power over all parameters!

Actually, while it would be cool to have the ability to both produce and read logfiles, I admit, rather sheepishly, that this can be filed under "user error." 

By way of explanation, I'm quite used to the navigational controls in M3D, but not so much in Mandelbulber.  I am trying to remedy that, but what I was wondering about has a everything to do with flying through things rather than around them.    :embarrass:

So what this *really* boils down to is that I need to really work on figuring out the controls better so I can navigate as fluidly as I would want and, well, not go whizzing through mountains, as it were.  Looks like I need to read up more on the site, Buddhi - Tips and Tricks explains this stuff, from what I've read.  I'll need to go practice up, it sounds like.

Phil