March 2010 – MakeFx

You like to play with fire but you don’t like to burn your fingers. Don’t you?

Hope

Thanks to Kendra Springer for this nice music.

Fyre draws chaotic figures (fractals) based on the Peter De Jong formula. You can use Fyre either to make still pictures or little animations.

Peter De Jong formula

Fyre gallery on flickr
Kenneth Hammond’s fyre artwork on deviantart

Playing with Fyre.

When you launch Fyre, it always starts with the same parameters. Same Width and Height of your final picture, same background and foreground colours, same minimal exposure and gamma, same values for the A, B, C, D parameters etc etc … As a result whenever you start Fyre, you’ve got the same figure (sort of rounded triangle).

Fyre at starting

To change this original graphic, you can either enter your own values for each parameters or use the Tools which will let you increase or decrease these values on mouse gestures.

For example: From blank project (Go -> Defaults);

change the background and the foreground colours,
increase the exposure and the gamma,
Choose a tool (eg: Tools -> AB/CD). Click on the figure and move the mouse to modify the values.
Check Emphasize transient in the parameter panel and change the Initial conditions.
Take random values for the A, B, C, D parameters with Go -> Random parameters

Choose a tool, modify the values. You know now how to manipulate Fyre.

Export your Art.

Abstract from the readme file: “All the images you can create with this program are based on the simple Peter
de Jong map equations […]. For most values of a,b,c and d the point (x,y) moves chaotically. The resulting image is a map of the probability that the point lies within the area represented by each pixel. As you let Fyre render longer it collects more samples and this probability map and the image becomes more accurate.”

So the images are calculated by the processor(s) of your computer. The longer the calculation last, the better the “quality” of the graphic is. That’s why you should take care to check View -> Pause Rendering each time you don’t want it to go further.

OK. It wasn’t really entirely made by you but you are proud of your Art. Fyre gives you the possibility to save it to .png images or .exr (OpenEXR). You will be able to keep the alpha channel if you chose a transparent background (or foreground) for your stills. For animated images that’s another thing.

Make the flames dance.

Animations are made through the animation window. It consists in choosing fixed figures named “keyframes” so that the software can calculate all the frames making the transition between these keyframes. You choose two key-frames, a duration and a speed (with the spline) and the animation window calculate each figure making the transition in-between.

Ignite Fyre. Start a new fyre or keep the default one.
View -> Animation Window.
Add : The current figure is added as a new keyframe in the animation list. Modify the duration and the speed (with the spline).
Back on the main window to draw another graphic. When done, add it in the animation window as a new keyframe.
etc etc

Play your work. Flames move.

Depends on size, framerate, quality, oversampling you choose for the final render… and speed of your CPU(s), rendering process will last just a while or ages.

Rendering this 640×480 project of 3’07” at 24 fps with quality 1,00 took me about 9 hours!! with my two cores athlon 7850. Rendering process for animated images cannot be made currently through cluster nodes.

Status bar gives information on the iterations done, their speed and the corresponding duration and quality for the figure drawn.

The generated .avi file is huge (almost 4 Gio for my project). To insert it into Cinelerra and add a sound track I had to convert it with Handbrake. The resulting file (.m4v format with mpeg-4 video codec, 5166 Kbps) was easily handled by Cinelerra.

Other tools using (or not) fractals: