Animating with Cutting

[tobiles]

Howdy, folks. I'm new here. Hope you don't mind me droppin in.

I absolutely love Mandelbulb 3d. What a marvelous and elegant instrument for conducting visual symphonies with equations. My hat is off to Jesse and anybody who helped. I have been learning a lot in a very short period of time recently and going crazy with animations, tweaking parameters to transform over time, really incredible power. I decided to start playing with  Cutting planes in the last few days, and I realize what a marvelous tool they represent.

For example, if you slice a figure at z=0, you get to see if it is hollow or filled, where, and how. It can be a nice shortcut to exploration, and offers a lot of power.

I produced an animation of a basic menger cube object being sliced from front to back, and it reveals a lot of interesting areas to explore. In order to produce the animation, I had to somewhat tediously slice a small increment at a time, from the main window, transfer to Navigator, set as a keyframe, and then back again, over and over, and I could not find a way to automate that like the scale and other parameters can be automated so nicely and interpolating the transitions automagically.

Being a lazy bum, and spoiled by the ease of so many other incredible tools, I sure would like to find an easier way to automate the slicing. It would make a nice tool for pre-exploring almost most any fractal object, just to get the lay of the land where to explore at more depth later, see where the interesting nooks and crannies might be, and give you a quick and easy entrance to some deep pockets of wonder.

Does anybody have a recommendation on how to automate this process a bit better? If not, maybe put a bug in Jesse's ear for considering it for a later enhancement. It would be really sweet to add cutting to the dynamic tools in the Navigator. Come to think of it, it would be handy to stamp a tweaked parameter's value across a range of an animation frames, much like you can stamp the frame number now, as long as I'm dreaming of enhancements.

I have a gif movie of the process I have described, if somebody can give me a clue how to post it and where (I haven't managed to find such a place yet ... this blog is like a fractal itself, ain't it? Sorta? Kinda? Maybe? Or, to put it in more old fashioned technerd terms, it is "a maze with lots of twisty passages in every direction").

I got tons more questions, but not in all one post, I suppose :-j.

[kameelian]

Hi and welcome,

Hmmm, I'm not quite sure if this is what you mean - but if, for example, you enter a slice figure of (say) x=0.2 and add the result to an anim keyframe, then change the figure to (say) x=1 and add the result of this to the next keyframe, you can then interpolate between the two (and see the bulb cut as an anim), without having to "tediously slice a small increment at a time." Does this help or do you mean to stop off between slices to explore further? In which case, you can use the new interploate tool  between keyframes, put the result into the Navi window and look around that way. Is this what you mean?

regards
Kam

[tobiles]

Geez, I thought I had tried that and failed, but with your inspiration I tried again. Yes indeedy, the slices are interpolated quite nicely, as I had originally hopes. Cool.

There is just so much to learn, so many paths to take, it's all a bit overwhelming.

Anyway, about posting the gif animations? I think they could be valuable tools for newbies wondering where to go, and what to do. I will gladly share whatever new things I discover in the process since I am so grateful for all that you folks have provided already.

[tobiles]

Okay, here is my doofus mistake ... when you render the frames for a slice walk on, say, the Z axis, from front to back, you must have the Z axis selected and rendered that way for it to "take" as a proper keyframe. I foolishly turned off the Z for the frame of the whole object, but switched it on for the Z frame of the last slice, so I got a jump from full to slice, instead of an interpolation across all frames that I wanted. Once that lesson was learned, I tried two and three dimension sweeps, and two works fine, but somehow with all three turned on I can't render a full object in the X axis. Odd.

So, give it a shot yourself and you may be pleased with the results, sweep one way, then another. It's nice to find that nifty speckely Mandelbrot shape in the middle of Bulbox.

[kameelian]

Hi again,

You're right about having to have the boxes ticked to get a smooth animation. It's not in order "for it to 'take' as a proper keyframe," but to prevent a new cut suddenly being added, giving the 'jump' you speak of....and it's not "foolish", it's  just a learning curve - as you say, there is a lot to learn. Stick at it.

As for the gif anims; you would attach them via the 'Additional Options' link below the text window when you post. However, you will find that they need to be hosted elsewhere and pointed to externally, as there is a file size limit on FF of 256kb, so most things are too big to upload.

regards
Kam