Export camera animation or merge with another 3D-program?

[jankosh]

Hi everyone!

Wow, this is truly amazing site, so much useful stuff going on here! Two months ago I didn't even know what Mandelbrot set means and now I am very excited to experiment with all the related stuff.. Last few days I found some great inspiration here but now it seems that googling won't do that much help so I decided to ask wise people of this forum 

I am currently in progress of creation of my graduation film. I won't bother You with details (yet ), but the thing I am trying to achieve is matching camera&character animation I created in Maya with fly-through in fractal. So far I explored only Mandelbulb 3D so maybe I am just not aware of functions of some other software that could do what I need.

Well, Maya 2013 can do some 3D fractals but it has a looong way to catch-up with free software like MB3D, so I am not trying anymore to do fractals there

I thought about some really crazy solutions, like rendering eg. some cubes in julia set (so that I have sort of a regular grid - I'm not sure if I am using right words ), then matchmoving the camera and after that translating it into Maya.. and of course re-animating everything according to cam's movement.. I have those animations in layout so it wouldn't be that much pain as having to completely get rid of final animation but still.. hmm, anyway, I guess there is not an easy way to change formula(s) (from "grid" to fractal of my choice) and still have the same movement, or is it?

If I understand that well, in MB3D one does not animate the camera but movement&rotation of fractal right? I have some unclear clue that I could somehow recalculate those numbers according to scene-scale in Maya which would give me sort of an easy conversion (then I would only need to place proper transform/rotation numbers on proper keyframes for camera in Maya and then just combine it in postpro)

It would be great to have some sort of camera exporter directly in the MB3D - I have some basic programming skills (and am learning fast ) so maybe I could be of some help if it came to programming solution, I just don't exactly know where to start.. I believe that more people would use feature like that (imagine being able to combine fractals e.g. with Blender, Maya or After Effects... at least in posptro - I am very well aware of restrictions related to polygons).. Or even better, to have camera animation importer 

Well, does anyone have idea how could that be done without exporting fractal to mesh? I definitely don't want to lose all that wonderful details! I've seen some combined stuff (like characters in fractal environment - in last chaosTV news), but it seemed to me like converted-to-mesh stuff... if someone could give any clue or at least point me to some direction, I would very appreciate that Have an awsome day! 

Thomas

P.S. Main actors of my gradution film are sperms 

[cKleinhuis]

hello and welcome to the forums,

hmm, hard task, with mb3d you would end up tracing back a path to your program, people have more success when playing with mandelbulber, because this one uses text files to define a scene, people started to hand edit the bezier spline pathes, this could
be a way for you too, but i am not an animation expert though ... perhaps others might help better here!