While this article is helpful it was written with an ancient release of Oxidizer and things have changed dramatically over time. With that in mind we’re keeping the article online for historical purposes; please take a detour over to our Introduction to Oxidizer tutorial over in the wiki — you’ll find up to date info on using Oxidizer in it’s present state.
Back in mid February of 2007 I took a brief look at Oxidizer as a Quick Review to share my excitement for what appeared to be a relatively unknown native Mac OS X application for rendering fractal flames. Now, several weeks later, and with a good number of nice flames rendered, the time is right for a follow up report. The primary idea for this tutorial is to pass on what I’ve learned, which admittedly, just covers some basic procedures. This article does not document the full range of Oxidizer’s capabilities; it does however, give one a good point from which to start exploring.
Before you get started.
The most important piece of information you need to know up front is Oxidizer requires a two part file save process; flame and image. The end result is a beautifully rendered fractal flame saved as a Photoshop file. But that’s putting the horse ahead of the cart. Just as critical, and even more so, is saving the native flame file before the image is rendered; the extension is .flam3. So, save as flam3, then save (render) the flame to one of the available image formats. Don’t skip saving the flam3 file — two solid days of program crashes taught me that lesson very well. Once I started saving, crashes have been almost non-existent.
Another thing one needs to be prepared for is lengthy render times. Depending on image size, complexity and quality settings a fractal flame can take several hours or several days to completely write. Patience Grasshopper; let Oxidizer run in the background while you mess around in Photoshop.
If you’d like to learn about the math concepts behind flam3 files be sure to check out the documentation links at Flam3.com.
Application Overview.
Launch Oxidizer and have a quick look at the toolbar and other items in the primary window.
- Open and Save. Open an existing flam3 file; save a flam3 file.
- Render. Export flam3 file as a static image.
- Animate. Export flam3 file as a movie.
- Breeder. Powerful tool for cross-breeding and mutating flam3 files.
- Gene Pool. Create and cross-breed up to sixteen fractal flames.
figure 1, Primary Window.
There are two fields below the toolbar.
- On the left, a column for displaying open flames along with buttons at the bottom for adding, editing, or deleting selected flames from the list.
- On the right, are the environmental controls; I have not made any alterations to those default settings in my current explorations of Oxidizer.
Wading in the Gene Pool.
There are three places one can generate basic fractal flames in Oxidizer; the primary window, Breeder, and Gene Pool. Of these options, the Gene Pool is the best place to start as it has sixteen image wells. Just hit the ‘Fill’ button to get the process rolling. See all those pretty flames, nice!
figure 2, Gene Pool.
Now, select two or more flames and hit ‘Breed’ to fill the image wells with cross-bred variants of your selected flames; more selections = more variety. Repeat as many times as you like or ‘Toggle’ all wells and ‘Fill’ them again to start from square one.
figure 3, Gene Pool with selected Flames.
Once you have a flame that trips your fancy, select it and send it to the primary window via the ‘Editor’ button. Switch to the primary window and save your flam3 file. Now it’s time to go in and make some big changes; select your flame and open it using the ‘Edit’ button at the bottom of the list area.
Lighting the flame.
The ‘Flame’ window has five tabs, each with a specific job to do.
- Image. Settings for dimensions, rotation, symmetry and more.
- Colour. Choose a gradient to apply to your flame; settings to control brightness, gamma, background colour and more.
- Render. Quality, filtering and a lot of other options I haven’t toyed with.
- XForms. Select and edit the various fractal components of your flame. Powerful stuff, this is a fun playground for mathemagicians.
- Edit. Access point for editing XML information for your flame. Can also be set globally in Oxidizer’s prefences.
figure 4, Flame Window Tabs.
What’s the best way to determine image size for rendering fractal flames? If the intended use is for desktop pictures, then the very least one should do is make an image that matches current monitor settings. If the rendered flame will be shared with others via web site downloads one should think big — really big. Just about anything I put up here at the Rampant Ranch™ has a native resolution of 2800×2100 pixels. This allows images to be scaled down or cropped to a nice array of widescreen, 4:3, or any other custom dimesion that may be needed.
figure 5, Flame Window Image Tab.
It will be necessary to adjust the ‘Zoom’ setting in order to fill the working canvas once the image size has been altered so dramatically from the 128×128 default. Zooming somewhere between 3.4 – 4.2 has worked very well for my renders, but don’t let that limit your explorations of how much or how little zoom to use.
* * * NOTE * * *
Please take a moment to check out a pair of updated ideas on using ‘Zoom’; Scale and Zoom Settings and Living without zoom. Then pop back into this article to finish up.
Position, rotation and symmetry are subjective in nature. Each of us will see those things differently and that’s exactly how it should be. Self-appointed gurus shouldn’t dictate a fixed notion of what is or isn’t acceptable. Let the artist decide!
And the same principals apply to choosing the colour palette for a flame. From what I’ve seen the default color usually makes for a great starting point but it’s always fun to experiment with colours. Save the default flam3 file, then tweak the colour and save again as a variant of the first. Heck, save an abundance of variants — the thumbnails make a nice a little tool for comparing flames in the Finder.
figure 6, Flame Window Colour Tab.
figure 7, Flame Colour Variants.
There are five optional settings to mess with in the Colour tab; Brightness, Vibrancy, Gamma, Gamma Threshold, Background Colour. You’re on your own here — mess around and have some fun!
When a flame is first created the ‘Quality’ setting in the ‘Render’ tab defaults to 25. Being overly cautious to not err on the side of too little quality I tried some renders dialed all the way up to 800. Then, steadily dropping quality back down, I found that a setting of 100 had no discernable differences when compared to the same image rendered at 800.
figure 8, Flame Window Render Tab.
And again, other than ‘Filter Type’, there are many options on the ‘Render’ tab I haven’t explored.
That leaves us with the last two tabs; XForms and Edit. As those items are beyond the scope of this article, just hit the text links for each to view screenshots of their contents.
Now that you’ve made some darn cool modifications to your fractal flame save the flam3 file and close the ‘Flame’ window. Time to render that magnificent creation as a static image! Hit the ‘Render’ button, choose a file type, file name and destination. Oxidizer will not add a file extension to the image so you’ll need to drop that on during the naming process.
Image formats are; SGI, Photoshop, BMP, JPEG, PICT, PNG, MacPaint, TIFF, TGA, JP2, QuickTime Image.
Breed…
bring about, give rise to, produce, generate, stir up.
As noted above, Oxidizer has a stand alone ‘Breeder’ that is a powerful tool for cross-breeding and mutating flam3 files. The best way to use the Breeder is to load it up with existing flam3 files. While it is possible to generate and work with new flames in the Breeder my delvings been much more successful (and less crash prone) by loading from my little library of flam3 files.
This tool is pretty basic. Load a flame in left and right columns, then start punching buttons to see what each one does with the pair of flames. Buttons are; Alternate, Interpolate, Union, Mutate.
figure 9, Breeder Window.
Flames generated by cross-breeding take on a greater degree of complexity and form, and just might make your eyes pop in wonder with how cool the results are. Neat stuff happens in here! Hit the ‘Edit’ button to send that cross-bred monster to the primary window, save the flam3 file, and head back into the Breeder for more fun.
Post Processing Tips.
Fractal flame images generated by Oxidizer are quite beautiful and stand up on their own very easily. You can, however, take them up a notch or two by fine tuning colour and contrast in Photoshop or other image editing software.
Got flames?
Shout back at me in the article comments if you have any follow up questions, and be sure to share links for Oxidizer images you toss up out there on the internet dirt road™.
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March 27, 2007
How could this great tutorial with no one leaving even one comment?
Great work! Oxidizer rocks. But people hardly know the existance of such kind of renderer.
Thanks a lot!
March 28, 2007
Thanks for the good word Felix :^) Oxidizer is a blast and rather unknown at this point, I’m hoping my desktops and this tutorial can help spread the word.
April 25, 2007
Thanks for the wonderful tutorial, it’s lovely to see people put my little program to use.
Dave
June 16, 2007
Hey, I’m really interested in Oxidiser, it’s just that my copy looks nothing like the version you’re running. I’m apparently running 1.0.
Any clues? I certainly don’t have a genepool or breeder – or even a tool bar!
Thanks for the walkthrough though. :o)
June 16, 2007
has anyone gotten the animate option to work. the render window with the thread progress bar pops up, but nothing happens. activity monitor shows that it’s doing stuff, but nothing ever happens.
using OSX 10.4.-
oh wait, never mind, it just takes awhile for the progress bar to register anything…
apparently the render time for still image is considerably faster than one frame of an animation…
is there a way to set the length of the animation?
also,
i have a core 2 duo MBP, but only one thread shows progress.
activity monitor shows complete usage of that core2duo though…
my sincere thanks to all who have had a hand in making this app possible! great work!
June 17, 2007
@ Alex | Sounds like you might have an install that went bad. You may need to give it another shot. If the problem persists you may want to contact the developer, David Burnett, through his blog to see if he has any suggestions. And just to be sure; minimum system requirements are for Mac OS X 10.4.
@ Monday | I haven’t messed with trying to animate a flame yet but I would assume render times increase dramatically. It may be good to start off at something no bigger than 400×400 pixels.
June 17, 2007
the problem with the animations is that it quits after one frame…there’s no way to set the duration of the animation..
i would actually pay for that ability…
July 14, 2007
This is it…the best (and only) Oxidizer tutorial on the ‘net.
I sat down with this article about a month ago and started experimenting with flames of my own. After a couple weeks I finally got the hang of this crazy app and started churning out renders.
If you’re interested: http://dao-yin.deviantart.com
Those are a few flames I’m pitting against the Apophysis onslaught on DA. :)
July 15, 2007
Wow! Very nice renders Dao-Yin :^)
‘Xenon’ and ‘Hues of Morpheus’ really catch the eye. I’ll be watching your DA page for more!
July 16, 2007
Me too -
I’m trying to use Oxidizer to create Electric Sheep like animations for use in VJing – Any more info on how to actually render animations would be much appreciated!
July 26, 2007
I’ve been playing around with Oxidizer for a few weeks and I have had some success with animation. For those of you who have been asking about animating, do the following: Start with a flame you like and drag it into the main oxidizer editor window. Open up Edit and the first tab under image is Time. You set this to be a number. I think it’s the number of frames. I generally use 100 per flame. Then bring in the next flame below it. Go and edit its time to 200. Drag it below the first flame. Do it again, for another flame and set the time to 300 etc. I also usually set the size to 512, but this drastically increases rendering time. After a while you’ll have, say, a dozen flames, going from 100, to 1200 in time. Hit animate and pick your format. I typically use Quicktime because of the quality, but it renders much larger files. Oxidizer will basically animate by interpolating between the different flames. I like to use a flame, the mutate it in the breeder, and bring it back in to the editor, then mutate it for the next frame and so on. That way you get an evolving series of related flames. It works very well. Patience with the rendering! It can take a whole day – and you’ll only get a few seconds or minutes of video. And do save your flame files. It helps. I find that Oxidizer has to first be open before you can reopen flam files.
Hope this helps.
July 26, 2007
Oh and a couple of other things: I usually set the environment quality at 8 when rendering the animations (again increases rendering time). Also apparently the flam3 engine is inherently poor at zooming. It can be done, but it takes forever to render and I’ve found zooming to be unstable. And by number of frames above, I mean video frames. ie Time = 100 = 4 seconds of video at 25fps. You can set the frame rate. I use one flame for every 100 frames of video, rendering between them.
July 26, 2007
Wow! Thanks for the tips cloudy :^)
I’ll give it a good shot or two (after my summer break) and will post back here with my experience. Do you have your animations uploaded anywhere? If not, I’d be happy to toss them up here at the Ranch.
July 26, 2007
Rampant1 – I don’t have them uploaded anywhere. How would I get the file to you? They can be pretty large – say 50 MB per file. At 256X256 that’s about 2 or 3 mnutes. At 512X512, it’s less than a minute. But the larger image is beautifully detailed.
August 9, 2007
Great tutorial! I was wondering why it kept shutting down when I clicked render! It would just disappear and I’d think “Is it meant to do that?”
I tried to render at 100 with my screen res (1280×800) I went out for about four hours and when I came back it was just under half way along the progress bar. Is that normal?
August 9, 2007
That is quite normal kristarella. I’ve had renders that have needed one week or more to complete.
August 9, 2007
Wow! So how do you know if they’re right? Do you do lots of little dirty renders or do you just go from the preview image? Bummer to render for a week and then not like the product.
Do you leave your computer running or can you put it to sleep and resume when it wakes up? Maybe I should use this program on my linux desktop instead of MacBook.
August 10, 2007
Well I’ve certainly rendered many more flames than ever got posted to the galleries. It’s just the nature of the beast for me. I’ll work up several preview variants of a flame and then do a high res render of the one that really grabs my eye. If that one isn’t what I envisioned then there are other variants to mess with or I just start again with a new batch.
I just hide Oxidizer and let it run in the background until the flame is done. With Oxidizer running in the background I work in Photoshop or other apps. I never put my system to sleep when Oxidizer is doing its thing. But I do let the display go to sleep on my iMac or I just turn of the monitor if I’m using my Power Mac G4.
August 27, 2007
Hi, after reading the comments here I thought I’d leave a few hints :-)
Use Scale instead of Zoom, it’ll render faster.
Quality Scale and Size scale are quick ways of altering the quality and size of all the genomes. Changing quality scale will effectively multiply your existing genome quality so that using a QS of 8 against a default of 50 is 400.
There’s a bug where altering size scale will almost certainly cause Oxidizer to fail when rendering an animation.
Dave
August 28, 2007
Great timing David!
I’ve been struggling with my first composition in 0.4.1 and have had nothing but sudden exits when rendering. Switching from Zoom to Scale squashed that bug for me. Thanks for the tip!
Should you ever be in need of a download mirror or webspace for a more thorough tutorial or wiki all you have to do is say the word.
Cheers :^)
August 28, 2007
If you could let me have a copy of a crashing version of that flame, I’d appreciate it.
You can send it to either the email address I use in the reply form (if you have access to it) or the my gmail account which you can probably guess is vargolsoft. (well it’ll fool the crap email address scanners, there’s no fooling the eyeball based ones :-)
September 4, 2007
Hi!
Great Blog. I have read everything with great interest.
What i want to ask now is about the Animation. Which Videoformat got the Alph-channel?
Thank you all in advantage.
Sincerly Markus Quintus
October 5, 2007
I downloaded Oxidizer, and I think it’s great, but it keeps “Unexpectedly Quitting”. (Probably due to the age of my G4)
October 5, 2007
What version did you download? I’d go with 0.3 for now, I’m still testing 0.4.1 and am experiencing crash issues as well. Once I have a little more info I’ll toss a note to the developer.
Old G4 shouldn’t be a big deal with 0.3, a good portion of my renders are on a 5 year old Power Mac G4 with a single 800 MHz processor.
October 5, 2007
Version 4. (My G4 is 500MHZ)
I’m finally getting the hang of this, and it hasn’t crashed in quite a while.
But could somebody explain all the numbers and decimals to me? (A 13-year old friendly explanation please.)
October 5, 2007
Ack! When I render it, it doesn’t show up where I saved it, and on Oxidizer says the flame is null.
October 12, 2007
Please send me any details of any problems, you’d be surprised how may times the first I hear of a problem is someone bringing it up on a forum or blog.
@Goatboy
If you saved the xml file please send it to me, I have a gmail account with the user name of vargolsoft hopefully you’ll be able to make that into a usable email address
I’m aware of an issue where the use of Zoom crashes a full render, Weirdly the problem only occurs on universal builds on the embedded flam3 software. As I’ve mentioned before the work around for this problem is to use Scale instead, as an added bonus it’ll vastly speed up your renders too. I’m actually tempted to add a warning when people use zoom, suggesting them try scale.
October 24, 2007
Oxidizer is a cool little program…ok maybe not so little lol. I let it run while I am in class or doing homework or whatever and come back to some fantastic renders and animations. I particularly like the animations, I just wish they didn’t take so long! All of the comments here have been very helpful, so this is my shout-out to all of you: Thanks! Today I let the program run for around seven hours rendering a big animation (1000×1000 and around a minute of video). I came back to check on it, and as I stare at the screen, the program crashes! All that time gone down the drain! I about kicked the computer lol…but when I looked back over the .flam3, I found that on my very last fractal/frame/whatever-you-call-these-cool-things I had set the zoom to 150 instead of the scale! I did kick myself after I saw that lol. Anyways, thanks for all you guys’ help again! And remember: check and recheck the settings before you hit animate!!!
Joe
November 17, 2007
Guys! What about those crashing? You do not have idea how to write good code? Then ask someone who knows that… It is quite a shame to have your application crash… Obtain a clue, people.
And regarding the flames, I’m totally impressed!!! What a marvels!
November 18, 2007
C’mon, don’t be so harsh here. Yes, crashes are a bit problematic even for me at the moment so I’m personally only working with version 0.3. The developer, David Burnett, has been kind enough to give me the opportunity to play with a new build, I’m hoping to toss some good feedback to him later this week.
And be fair. How much did you pay for Oxidizer? Not a dime? I thought so.
Think about the development for a moment; looking at release numbers I think it’s easy to see Oxidizer has not reached 1.0 status and won’t do so for some time yet. This gives us the chance to help the developer squash bugs by giving good and honest feedback of our experiences.
Me, I’m just an artist that has found a great appreciation for an application that has the potential to be a great product as it matures. A product that I wouldn’t hesitate to drop some cash on. Oxidizer renders the most beautiful flames on the Mac platform and that makes me more than patient in seeing where we’ll be as future builds are tossed at us.
I don’t pretend to understand the underlying code or mathematics that drive Oxidizer, I’ll leave that in to the “mathemagicians” in the group.
November 18, 2007
Hrissan
Oxidizer is an open source project, you’re more than welcome to put your code where your mouth is.
December 21, 2007
I’m lovin’ Oxidizer. amazing stills, and starting to create animations, too :-)
Question is: What setting will give me the most detailed hi-res output.. especially when doing animations?
I’m rendering 1920×1080 output and notice blockiness in the fall-off areas from bright colors to black (both in stills and QT output – not a QT codec issue :-)
Is there a way to really get the most detail so these will be smooth gradients? I’m willing to wait for longer renders, but I’m hoping for really really crisp, hi-def quicktime output.
Thanks!
- valentin
artist, producer, ninja
December 23, 2007
Hello Valetin,
My personal approach in 0.4.2 is to use a about a 1.5 setting on ‘scale’ and then ‘zoom’ at the best setting for how I want to crop my flames. Then, in ‘render’ options, I’ve been using 800 for the ‘quality’ setting. This has worked well for the stills I render at 3360×2100 pixels and most are completed within 12 hours or so; sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on flame complexity.
Hope this helps!
February 19, 2008
Hi: this has been a big help. Unfortunately not big enough for me. Is there anywhere where there are step by step instructions to just generate a file I could post on my blog? I got a huge rendered image but I can’t seem to figure out how to go from .flam to jpg. I’ll worry about the fun and tweaks later if I can only get this part done.
Thank you!
February 20, 2008
Okay Andree (how do I get accents in the comments ?)
Depending on what you’ve already done….
To render a flam3 xml file direct to a jpg…
Open the flam3 file in oxidizer
Either press the render button and choose the ‘Render Still To File’ menu option in the Render.
Choose JPEG in the drop down menu in the save file dialogue
Choose a location for the file and a file name
Press the ‘Save’ button
Wait for the image to render
If the checkbox on the save file dialogue was checked then the image will pop
Either way you will get a ‘Render Finished’ message box.
Navigate to where you saved the file in finder, so find the image
If you ever chose the ‘Render Still to Window’ option and as to save the image just drag and drop it into finder oron to the desktop. That’ll save the image as a PNG file. Then just use your favourite editor / converter to save it as a JPEG.
February 20, 2008
Accents and other cool HTML code snippets for non-standard characters can be converted on this page. Just copy and paste into your post/comment.
⇒ ½ φ ≥ ∇ © é ♠ σ
Doing so is not only cool but keeps us in compliance with W3C standards :^)
Now, back to our regularly scheduled topic.
February 21, 2008
I’m super low-tech, I just use the render window and click+drag the PNG to the desktop. I’m sure that’s not the optimal image quality, but really, it looks good enough for me :)
February 22, 2008
In Oxidizer, the main difference I notice between dragging from the window and rendering to file is that the window version ups the saturation a bit.
February 22, 2008
Thank you, David. I’m going to try that now. The updates on zoom and scale are pretty confusing, too. But I’m working on it and not giving up. I did find that drag from the window thing. The trouble is, I have no idea what I did right to get only one rendered image. It’s been a week now and I can’t recreate it. But now I’m taking pages of notes.
the accent: on mac (Of course!): option-shift-e, then type e again to get the e under the accent.
:0)
February 22, 2008
so one flam file has 16 images in it?
February 22, 2008
TBob: that’s interesting, I hadn’t noticed that so I just ran a quick test to check. It looks like rendering a PNG to disk includes a ColorSync profile, “Calibrated RGB Colorspace” (must be a generic one, it’s not one of mine) – but not when dragging from the render window. That’s good to know!
Andreé: the flam3 file stores all the flames that you have in the Oxidizer main list into a single file, whether it is one or 16 or whatever.
February 29, 2008
I’ve played with Oxidizer and successfully used it to render lower res images ( ie: 500 x 600 and 750 x 900) in the past. I’m an artist, not a mathematician, but playing with inputs has been rewarding and interesting Now, however, when I change the size from the 100 x 100 original setting to even 400 x 400 and zoom it in, a large portion of the image from the center out is grayed out. This happens with flames I’ve saved in the past and loaded back in the editor as well as newly random flames. Help! What have I done?
I’m having withdrawal, here…
March 1, 2008
Zoozyq can you send me some examples.
The only change to the rendering algorithm recently is the fix for the final xform bug, I’ll have a look at the recent flam3 changes see uf I can spot anything.
March 1, 2008
Okay. Thanks. It began doing this with the 0.4.2 version, so I downloaded 0.4.3 hoping for a better result, but… same thing. I’m in the middle of backing up my drive, so I’ll send it tomorrow. I’m working on a 17 inch MacBook Pro, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, running OS 10.4.11–not ideal, I know.
Zoozyq
March 2, 2008
I don’t believe it, but when I tried Oxidizer this morning to save examples for you, David, it worked normally! I’m so relieved but also unsure about what is going on and when it will happen again… !? I guess that’s life, though… Thanks anyway for offering to help. My website, if you’re interested: http://web.mac.com/zoozyq.
March 9, 2008
I am so happy with Oxidizer, now! I’m getting better results with this new version. Thank you, David! :-)
April 19, 2008
I am totally new at this. I have a dumb question, probably–all the images on Oxidizer are so TINY–is there a way to view them large before choose which to work with etc? Apophysis seems so much easier than Oxidizer. For a beginner, I mean.
April 19, 2008
Is there any way to view any of the images at any stage LARGER? How?
April 19, 2008
Hi Mary,
Try a combination of “Size scale” and “Render Still to Window”
April 19, 2008
Thanks, I will! :-)
April 28, 2008
Mary,
I usually change the image size up to at least 500×500 and increase the scale as well as some manipulation of the zoom. I preview it to see how it looks in the frame and make more adjustments as needed before I render it. This size doesn’t take forever to render and gives you a better view of the fractal. From there, you may want to make more adjustments and render it even larger. Have fun! ( Be aware that this practice can become very addicting! )
July 2, 2008
Many, MANY thanks for the terrific (and free) program, David! And many thanks for the tutorial, Scott. Someone earlier mentioned Electric Sheep, and that is indeed the reason I came to Oxidizer. I’ve managed to generate a decent MPEG, but I’m having trouble getting it to run on ES.
I’ve named it “esp010.mpg” and placed it in the appropriate folder (~user/library/application support/electric sheep — where all the others are), but when I run the screensaver, it says: “Playing animation #0″ and does nothing (displays the last frame of the previous animation until I deactivate).
Is there some naming convention I’m not following? I notice the others all have names like “00202=15117=15036=15079.mpg”..
Does anyone have ideas or suggestions? I know this isn’t the ES forum, but the ES wiki doesn’t have much Mactivity.
July 2, 2008
Hi eric:p, thank you for the kind words.
Electric Sheep, I see you’ve asked on the list about this and been directed towards supplying genomes. So I’d just add a bit more.
First in that, despite the mpg suffix the files that ES plays are actually mpeg2 files so you need to encode using either a MPEG2 QT plugin, or a third party MPEG2 encoder like mpegenc as spot suggested. The next version of ES will use MP4 so you should be able to encode directly from Oxidizer and drop them in the folder. It’s that version of ES that Oxidizer targets.
There is a pattern to the movie naming convention, based on the genomes submitted and breed by the ES server.
For your example… 00202 is the current flock of sheep, 15117 is the sheep genome at the start, 15117 is the middle genome and 15036 is the end genome. This is what ES calls an ‘edge’, its a transition movie between ‘loops’.
Loops are movies of rotations of a single genome and they have names where all three genomes are the same number like 00202=12387=12387=12387.mpg. ES, after downloading enough movies, tries then to join these loops and edges to give the effect of a single continuous movie.
Oh if you decide to submit genomes then remember that as Oxidizer targets the next version of ES, currently in beta, the genomes are not always compatible with the current version. There’s a lua script that comes with Oxidizer, ‘genome_makes_valid_sheep.lua’ that will check a genomes compatibility with the live version.
July 2, 2008
Yeah, I seem to have gotten the hang of it all. My first sheep is being compiled as we speak.
http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/cgi/node.cgi?id=120212
Thanks again!
August 6, 2008
this is one of the happiest days of my life. for the last three years i have been counting, feeding, de-fleecing, shepherding, re-counting and learning to say, baaaah, baaaeeehhhhh, baaaahhh. finally, i am a genetic scientist! a god if you will.
come round my little children. let me count you in ways i have never counted you before.
February 26, 2009
Hey, Just downloaded version 0.5.5.
thank you SO much for this amazing software and tutorial..my eyes have opened into another dimension altogether ; )
March 11, 2009
The tutorial helped a little bit, but I don’t feel it’s helped me enough that I can get on my own two feet. I’m still wondering how to render the flames so they come out looking like yours or Dao-Yin’s.
Plus, I’m still confused over the whole Flam3 xml file thing. Some help would be greatly appreciated, you could reply here or email me at djjiggens@gmail.com
March 12, 2009
Hi Scott,
Let me thank you for keeping up this blog; it has been a great source of information as I’m learning my way around Oxidizer.
I would also like to express my gratitude to David Burnett for creating this program. I think it has tremendous potential and I’ll look forward to the upcoming improvements.
I have created an Oxidizer folder in DA, if you’re interested to have a look:
http://kancano.deviantart.com/gallery/#Oxidizer
March 12, 2009
@ Jacob » The tutorial is a bit long in the tooth and outdated in some respects. Should have a remedy soon that will get us current and be easily updated for future Oxi releases too.
Saving your files is two step process. The genome xml, represented by the .flam3 file, and an image or animation that is rendered from the xml.
It can be somewhat challenging to identify genomes that make good candidates for further tweaking. The best advice I can give is to mess with all of the settings within the Editor window to see what effects they return. Then do some cross breeding in the Breeder as a follow up — work them puppies.
Also, I make no secret that nearly all of my genomes are hit with some sort of post processing in Photoshop. Sometimes a little, sometimes quite a lot.
Rather than depend on a closed email discussion for more info I’d like to encourage you to post follow up questions in the forum. That will give other users the opportunity to share knowledge and thereby make the community stronger.
Scotty out!
March 12, 2009
@ Kancano » Nice compositions you’ve got there! Should you ever get the hankering to render some desktop sized images toss a few our way — it’s always a blast to feature artwork by others here at the Ranch™.
July 22, 2009
This has been so helpful! I had used Apophysis on PC for a little over a year and just found Oxidizer for Mac a couple of weeks ago. I fumbled around a bit with some modest results, but your overview gives me the knowledge and inspiration to just keep on experimenting. Thanks so much. You put a lot of work into this. Bravo!
July 25, 2009
Love the new 5.5 version! So fast!!! I’ve had it a while but was inadvertently starting up the older version. No wonder I wasn’t seeing the changes. LOL Scott, thanks again for all your help in using this wonderful application…as an artist who is totally smitten with Ox it means a lot. LOL
August 2, 2009
You can grab 0.5.9.3 from this post :^)
March 6, 2010
First of all – thanks for Oxidizer and thanks for this tutorial. I’m working with animations and effects are just amazing. But I cannot find any “knob” that would control the speed of the movement (sometimes I’d like to really slow things down). Is the Transformation Editor the right place to do things like this? (I’ve found myself a little bit overwhelmed with it, at the moment).
Anyway, it gave me a lot of fun and inspiration. Thanks!
March 6, 2010
After all this time I still haven’t played with animation in Oxidizer so I’m not sure if Ralf covers that topic in his animation tutorial in the Wiki. Check ‘em out here; Part I, and Part II.