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Author Topic: Keyframe Interpolation Slider  (Read 2237 times)
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lukesleftleg
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« on: April 23, 2013, 10:51:41 AM »

Hi.

First of all, thank you very much for this fantastic program. I'm still getting to grips with it, but I'm having loads of fun.

Anyway, something that would be really useful for creating animations would be something like a slider or something, so that rather than having to render out a load of small preview images to make sure the camera doesn't fly wildly between keyframes, you could simply use the slider (or something) to, say, interpolate between the currently selected keyframe and the next, and get a rough idea from the render window whether the Catmull-Rom Spline is going to take you where you want to go, or whether the camera is going to fly through a load of walls before getting back on track (and therefore, the keyframes in question need editing).

Sorry, I haven't described that very well.
Does that make sense?

--- Edit ---

Maybe use the mouse wheel instead of a slider? Just an idea.
« Last Edit: April 23, 2013, 11:36:59 AM by lukesleftleg » Logged
taurus
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« Reply #1 on: April 23, 2013, 02:58:35 PM »


Does that make sense?


must admit, that I don't really understand what you want this slider to do.

want something like the navigator in m3d?

for existing keyframes, you can control the accuracy of interpolation by adjusting the number of steps between keyframes down to 10, 5 or 2 if you want (guess 1 doesn't make sense) in order to get a qick glance of your way through your fractal.
« Last Edit: April 23, 2013, 03:00:45 PM by taurus66 » Logged

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cKleinhuis
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« Reply #2 on: April 23, 2013, 03:02:30 PM »

the slider shall show the actual frames generated from keyframes ... so that you have a visual idea from what is generated inbetween keyframes, i find it a good extension, so, to elaborate, you have keyframe 1 and keyframe 2 , how can you check what animation is generated by this ?
in manndelbulb3d you can render a preview wink but a nice slider for the realtime preview would be nice, although relatively hard to just stick to the keyframes when in this mode ... basically the fields should be just editable when reached a keyframe ....
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taurus
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« Reply #3 on: April 23, 2013, 03:41:14 PM »

how can you check what animation is generated by this ?
still don't understand. check the animation by generating it? only quicker?

in manndelbulb3d you can render a preview wink
without doing a tutorial here, mandelbulber already can do this with the given functions - and store the settings (like resolution number of frames etc.) for that preview. It is not a single button thing, but still quite easy to do.
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lukesleftleg
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« Reply #4 on: April 23, 2013, 04:40:23 PM »

Sorry, yeah, I had a feeling I could have described it better.

At the moment, let's say I have ten frames zooming into a Mandelbox, but as well as a zoom, I want the camera to turn between frames 4 and 5.

Right now, the only way I can check that the spline created by the control points at the keyframes follows a nice smooth path between frames 4 and 5, and doesn't skew wildly (through walls and such) is to render out a load of preview frames (say 160x120) and preview the whole thing in Vdub.

This is entirely doable, but it seems a little long-winded when all I want to do it to check if a set of keyframes make a nice smooth flightpath, or (because I've placed a bad keyframe) the Catmull-Rom Spline bends in an unexpected way and the camera goes through a load of walls.

As an analogy, if you think of something like the timeline in say 3DS MAX or Adobe Flash, where you create a keyframe at one point, and then move an object and create a keyframe at another point on the timeline, you can then drag the pointer along the timeline to see how the object will 'tween' between the two keyframes. (I realise the analogy breaks down slightly because keyframes are treated a little differently in those programs).

Maybe something like this (just as a for instance, off the top of my head):
An extra slider control in the Timeline window, which when I have say frame 4 selected, as I move the slider along, interpolates along the Catmull-Rom Spline towards the position in frame 5, so that when it's at 50%, the display window shows where the camera would be when the render process reaches the point halfway between those two frames, at 0% just shows frame 4, and when it's at 100%, it's basically showing frame 5 (more or less), but the point of this being that it follows the same Catmull-Rom Spline that the animation rendering process will use.

Don't worry if it's too difficult to implement. I think I'm getting better at understanding how to avoid the wild spline bends, and like I say, I can render out a load of previews, but I have a feeling that the process would be made a lot quicker if I could just 'scrub along the timeline' like I can in MAX or Flash.

Thanks very much for your consideration though. smiley
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taurus
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« Reply #5 on: April 23, 2013, 07:20:34 PM »


As an analogy, if you think of something like the timeline in say 3DS MAX or Adobe Flash, where you create a keyframe at one point, and then move an object and create a keyframe at another point on the timeline, you can then drag the pointer along the timeline to see how the object will 'tween' between the two keyframes.
 

I think I know what you want, but it's a little trickier with fractals, as they don't have a clear given geometry. They consist of a bunch of distance estimated points in space - so if you want no object exists, without its distance to the viewpoint.
Although modern GPUs should be fast enough to solve that. Unfortunately their programming seems to be a pain in the ass. Buddhi postboned his attempts to implement opencl and the only advanced fractal gpu renderer - fragmentarium - does not support keyframe animation yet.
I would like such a functionality too, but I guess we need to be patient a little longer...
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lukesleftleg
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« Reply #6 on: April 23, 2013, 08:11:23 PM »

Ahh well, thanks very much for the replies though. I do appreciate them.

But you say that openCL rendering is still a possibility in the future? I'll keep my fingers crossed for that then. smiley

Just one other idea I had after writing that last post though, and please forgive me if I'm overstepping my place here. I am after all, a bit of a noob on these forums, but while browsing around some of the other posts, I noticed one or two people asking about maintaining a constant flight speed in their animations.

At the moment, the timeline is implemented in such a way that frames are in fixed positions, with a fixed (but editable) number of frames between them. If it was instead implemented more like in MAX or Flash, where the frames on the timeline are constant, but where the keyframes can be placed at arbitrary positions along it (with a variable number of frames between), but can also be moved to different points during the editing process, then sorting out things like flight speed might become easier.

Anyway, just a thought from a very new noob (on these forums, at least).
Like I say, I realise there's probably a number of other things to work on, but I thought I'd just throw the idea in there.

But thanks again for the replies, and for a truly fantastic program cheesy
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Buddhi
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« Reply #7 on: May 02, 2013, 08:59:30 PM »

I agree with your suggestions. I will try in future to do keyframing more user-friendly. Now it's only basic implementation. There would be also nice to have possibility to change intervals between key-frames and show in some way how the camera path looks like.
However now I see in program code many other things which have to be mostly rewritten. Some parts of program for now are not so flexible and difficult to improve. Event to change key-frame interpolation method will be difficult now. Unfortunately now I have not so much time for programming (2 years baby :-).  I have a lot of ideas but no free time to implement them. Especially I would like to play more with OpenCL which looks very promising and open way to do fast previews.
Last thing which was implemented is rendering over network which also speeds up rendering a lot when you have several machines. I was also "demand from market".
By the way thank you for sharing your remarks.
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lukesleftleg
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« Reply #8 on: May 03, 2013, 11:46:12 AM »

Hi Buddhi, and thanks very much for the reply.

Well, if these things are on the list, then I'll just go into waiting patiently mode, and enjoy what we already have in the meantime.
I also have a few other ideas, but it sounds like you already have plenty, and I know how a two year old baby can take up all your time.
Congratulations, by the way. smiley

I'd love to be able to help out with some code as well.
Unfortunately though, while my Java might be pretty reasonable, I can barely put a sentence together in C++.
Still, I've downloaded the source code, and I'm going to have a go at building it later.
After that, who knows?

Oh yeah, and I uploaded my first fractal video.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/xBqYZtzpGOU&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/xBqYZtzpGOU&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

It really needs re-rendering in higher rez, and a much lower DE step, and YT's encoding has been a bit brutal with the compression, but hey, it's a start.
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joe
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« Reply #9 on: October 11, 2013, 07:38:01 AM »

In animation tab, use "start frame"  to render frame partway between keyframes. Is that what you were wanting to do?
Sometimes if a spline doesn't work well for me I will just render two or three keyframes at a time, or make alternate sets of keyframes with different movement, then use startframe to build up composite animations from several possible motion pathways, in sections. Ugh. So hard to explain.
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lukesleftleg
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« Reply #10 on: December 23, 2013, 09:46:31 AM »

Hi Joe, thanks for the reply.

Yeah, I realised that I could do that quite a while after I wrote this post actually, and with the OpenCL mode speeding things up so much now, it renders this thread kinda redundant really.

Oh well. It seemed like a good idea at the time. smiley
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