Improving Animating

[BadCRC]

In my opinion Mandelbulber is the best renderer over all the others.  The animations look great, but it is not easy to produce long animations that are smooth with consistency.  The part of the program that needs a little improvement is the animation interface IMHO.

Here are a few suggestions that might help make it easier to create animations:

1. It would be great if people especially Buddhi would post a few example settings of animations.  So people might have a better understanding of how to do it properly.

2. Adding "Frames per key" in the timeline for each key.  This way one could have better control of the speed of the animation.

3. Mouse-wheel for movement and zooming.  Like the one in Mandelbulb 3D.  Mouse click for camera rotation(people are 50/50 on this on this feature so a check mark or double click to enable might be prudent).

4. Camera Roll buttons in the 3D Navigator section.

5. Maybe a button or check mark to enable or disable navigator mode in which it would reduce the image resolution to 160 x 120 then back to whatever it was.  Or maybe just a navigator window?

6. Key-frame Save-as and Load in the Timeline window.

Thanks to all the people that contribute to this project especially Buddhi.  It should have a Donate option to keep it going and improving.  Keep up the good work.

[Side B]

Something I've done which I would love to implement in Mandelbulber is "mid keyframes" Maybe I make a nice 50 frames/key animation. But between keyframe 2 and 3, I want the camera to rotate. What I've done is I created a script that creates new keyframes with 25 frames/key between the already existing ones, setting all changing values in between the previous keyframes. From what I've understood, this won't be exactly the same as the actual middle between 2 keyframes because of the nature of Catmull-Rom Splines.
What I would love is a "decrease frames/key"-option that would do this in the program.

[mintaka]

@BadCRC:
I did number 4 in the patch i posted: http://www.fractalforums.com/mandelbulber/mandelbulber-1-06-patch/ good software to improve my c++ skills (don't mind the writing error in the address, it's for 1.08)

Frames per key: seconded. Perhaps i try to do that as well, doesn't seem so difficult. The feature would confuse a bit though, if the frame numbers would not be given in the timeline. Key/framenumber output function on the command line would also be needed.

I want to add:
7. Auto-save timeline images along with .fract files and reload them as needed. Rendering them every time i open the timeline window is too slow, IMO. (Will also look into this, it's a more advanced task for me)

And when we are at autosave: load the saved JPEG when i hit the back button (or would it even be possible to save the whole rendering state so that rendering could be resumed from where we left?).

[isosceles]

--- Adding 'frames per key' would be incredible. I believe this is might be complicated by the use of Catmull-Rom Splines...

--- I've also envied the mouse-wheel for movement and zooming within Mandelbulb3D.

--- The check mark to reduce HR resolution to a default preview resolution would be quite handy.