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This tutorial was written by: HaLo2FrEeEk
Note: This tutorial is out of date, I will be updating it soon to show how to cut out the ImageReady step completely.
So, you've learned how to make basic fractals in apophysis. In doing so, you probably saw the  button, and liked what that did. Did it ever occur that you could actually save that animation?
I'll tell you how in this tutorial.
You will need:
Flam3
Animation Render script
note: This tutorial uses Adobe ImageReady and Sony Vegas 7, you may use whatever programs you feel comfortable with.
I'll assume you know how to make a basic fractal and jump right in.
First, download Flam3 to your desktop, and unzip the files inside to C:\flam3, then create another folder inside C:\flam3 called anims, you should have this:
Then download the Animation Render script and save it to C:\Program Files\Apophysis 2.0\Scripts.
Now, open up Apophysis and scroll through the presets until you find one you like, I like this one:
If you like it how it is, click File > Save Parameters, change the file name to something you want, I'll name mine pinky, and save it to my desktop, for the title, give it the same name as the filename (in my case, pinky) but add a number at the end, for me, I would put these settings:
If you want to alter it before saving it, click Flame > Editor and move the triangles and their corners around until you've gotten it how you like it, then folow the saving instructions above.
Now click File > Open and open the file you just saved:
Now you need to make some keyframes, to do this, simply alter your flame a little bit by clicking on Flame > Editor and changing it, when you get one you like, close the box, wait for it to refresh the picture, then click File > Save Parameters again, leave the file name alone, but under title, increase the number by one:
You should now have two keyframes in the list on the left, I will have Pinky_01 and Pinky_02. To preview your animation so far, click Script > Open... and open tw_morphPrvRen.asc (type t on your keyboard, it should be the only one that starts with a t, it'll snap right to it):
Nothing will change visually on your screen, now click Script > Run "tw_morphPrvRen" or hit F8 on your keyboard, type 1 in the prompt that opens and click ok, a little window will open up with a preview of your animation:
Keep doing this until you have a few keyframes, I would not recommend doing any more than 6, as normal home computers have a hard time handling fractals. I'm going to do three, for speed's sake:
When you are ready to save your animation, click Script > Run "tw_morphPrvRen" again, or hit F8 on your keyboard, but this time type 2 into the box, you will get a series of prompts asking for settings, most can be left default, I'll tell you what I put:
Flame Name: Pinky
Output path: c:\flam3\anims\
Render Width: 500
Render Height: 500
Render Quality: 20*
Filter Radius: 0.4
Oversample: 1
Filetype: png
Number of frames per Animation stage: 50**
Flam3 software path: c:\flam3\
* This is not the same as Apophysis's default rendering engine, 20 is fine for what we are doing here, do not put anything higher than 100, most home computers can't handle that.
** This is the number of pictures that will be rendered x the number of keyframes, since I have 3 keyframes, I will output 150 pictures, the higher this number, the better your animation will look, but it will take much longer to render.
Ok, now you have your flam3 file saved, navigate to C:\flam3\anims and you will find two files, for me, they were named: pinky.flame and pinky-animate.bat:
To begin the render, simply double click the bat file, a command window will open up, with statistics about the render process:
Heres a rundown on those numbers:
Time: 0/99/1 means that I am on the first picture out of 100 (counting starts at 0), on the first frame
Chaos: 13.5% means that I am 13.5% done rendering this picture
ETA: 71 seconds, Estimated Time til Arrival, it means that there is approximately 71 seconds left rendering this picture.
On average, each picture should take about 70 seconds with the settings I specified, Since I have 150 pictures to render, at 70 seconds a piece, by my math, thats about 10500 seconds, or 175 minutes, or about 3 hours of rendering, I suggest that you sit tight until thats done, maybe play GoW on Insane, or start a new file on Oblivion.
...
Ok, you're done, great. You have 150 pictures that you need to make into an animation. at 30 frames per second, 150 frames will turn out to be about 5 seconds of animation. Your first though might be to import straight to your favorite video editing program, in my case, Sony Vegas 7, but on second thought, I don't really feel like manually resizing 150 pictures to 1/30th of a second each, that might take a while, but there is an alternative.
My note above states that I will use Adobe ImageReady and Sony Vegas 7 for this tut, this is where ImageReady comes in (I'm going to use pictures that I pre rendered, not the one I have been using for this tut, I don't feel like waiting 3 hours)
Open up Adobe ImageReady, click File > Import > Folder as Frames...
Ok, so you should now have all 150 (or in my case, 300) pictures open, the animation window should have them listed, underneath each picture it should say 0 sec, meaning that there is no delay between frames, it plays like a movie, which is what we want.
If you want to save the picture optimized for a white background, click File > Save Optimized As... and save to your desktop with default settings, if you want to save optimized for a black background, follow this handy pictorial:
I personally want to optimize for a white background, so I'm gonne save with default settings:
Ok, once that is done saving (it might take a while,) open up Sony Vegas and import the gif you just created:
Drag the picture from your Project Media to the timeline. Now, since I was using a folder with 300 pictures in it, ImageReady created an animation that should be 10 seconds long, Vegas will always put pictures onto the timeline as 3 seconds long, If you used the settings I recommended, (3 keyframes, 50 pictures each,) you will have a 5 second animation, and you'll need to stretch it, to do this, put your mouse over the end of the picture on the timeline and hold down ctrl on your keyboard, with ctrl held down, drag your picture so that it is the right length, in my case, 10 seconds, so I'll need to add 7 seconds to it:
Now, that looks gross, if you look at the preview, since I rendered optimized for a white background, it looks bad, no worries, we simply need to add a white background to the movie, go to your Media Genarators tab, click Solid Color on the left, drag the white one to the track below your animation, and resize it to the same length as your animation (it imports to the timeline as 10 seconds):
You're almost there, all thats left is to render the movie, to do this, click File > Render and the save prompt will come up, enter a name, then click save...
And you're done. I hope this helped some people, even though it was rather long.
Here are two that I've done:
Teh Cool
This was the one used in this tutorial
Pinky
Questions? Ask them here and one of our friendly members will be happy to help you.
note: You will need to have an account on the forum to ask questions, but its free.
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