From a fellow fractal enthusiast, I want to say a huge (belated) thanks for these tutes, Don. I learnt lots from your videos, and I have posted a couple of basic animations that I have come up with so far. Although they aren't overly complicated I wanted to show a couple of the basic things that you can do.
I've been getting familiar with the program for a while now but still have lots to learn, and would like to offer a couple of things that I put in my animations, although I was abit slow to post. Firstly, I seem to find the Julia sets from the Abox can be more useful for investigations, and there appear to be a relationship between where you select it from and which particular features dominate the overall set. But usually you'll get a layer region, and then a more "open space" where you can find cool looking details to fly around -
Already you can see in some of the video animations that you can get some really cool efects in animations by varying the parameters of the fractal /during/ the animation, and of course even if you don't, at least choosing a few different orientations of your viewpoint using the keys in the 3D navigator to get slewing, rotating and yawing at various keyframes can give a sense of flying through the fractal. It is important to think about the path you are taking and it does take a few goes to get the hang of it.
One watchout I found when generating longer animations is that the default for the animator is to overwrite the existing frames, but if you are like me and come back to extend a flight from an earlier path, if you have stored the renders from the existing flythrough, you only need to generate the later frames, it can save a bit of time. However, this can sometimes lead to what appears to be a stutter sometimes, so YMMV, and if you have a fast enough computer it isn't so important.
Finally, I wanted to post something that shows a few points worthy of looking around, so my anims so far are pretty short and basic in nature. But eventually it would be nice to put together something that uses the DOF and stuff, lighting and make a nice atmospheric soundtrack to go with it.
its on my utube: (how do you imprt it into a message?)
http://www.youtube.com/v/c7ojtAcVNH8&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1 I'm really grateful to everyone who helped make these great fractal programs and their inspirational images and animations.