Filmer V2.0 - A program for creating fractal animation

Filmer in action

Download fsrc20.zip (68K) - Requires JDK or JRE

Screen shot

Instructions

DOS Version 1.12

Longer example animation

Overview
Filmer is a front-end program for Fractint that generates amazing fractal animation. Fractint is a program for calculating still fractal images (you need Fractint installed to use Filmer). Filmer uses Fractint parameter (.par) files to specify the coordinates and other parameters of a fractal. It then calculates the intermediate frames and calls Fractint to make a continuous animation. Filmer also has many options for pallete rotation and generation.

New Version!
Well, I finally decided to get off my butt and write a new version of Filmer. Almost all my planed improvements went into this one.

New Features:

  • Story-board Previewing of your film postage-stamp sized.
  • Color map previews. It shows you the color map it's going to use, and previews the postage-stamps with that map. You can discard the map and try again until you get one that you like.
  • Source Code. Source code is included in the regular distribution.
  • All fractal types are supported (as far as I know)
  • Center-mag is now the preferred way to specify coordinates - supports rotation, skew, and stretching
  • Full GUI with previews of your key-frames and viewing of .gifs as they are generated.
  • Network support allows many computers to all work on the same film.

Other Links:

  • NOTE: I removed the win32 installation because the Java VM was hopelessly out of date, and I'm sure Sun and my ISP would both rather you got it from the source. Download either the latest JRE or JDK. JRE will let you run Filmer only, the JDK will let you compile it yourself - if you want to make modifications.
  • Noel Giffin's Fractint Homepage - a great source for more fractal info including help with Fractint
  • Fractal Science Kit - I haven't tried this myself (windows only), but it looks interesting.
  • GIF Movie Gear - A good program for making animated gifs from a series of single gifs.
  • Daves Targa Animator - A fine DOS program for converting a series of gifs (or TGAs) into an Autodesk file (.fli or .flc). Dave has a new version and his own animation player too.

Anybody have a favorite animator for Unix? Something for .mpeg? Let me know and I'll link to them from here.