Animation

From Filter Forge Wiki

Animating filters

Filter Forge comes with the ability to batch render using a command line renderer. One of the key features of Filter Forge has always been seamlessness. With the batch renderer this is not only true for space but also for time: you can easily build a filter that can be seamlessly tiled as well as seamlessly looped.

creating filters

linear movement

The most important thing in an animation is time. So the easiest way to animate a filter is to make one that has movement in it. Simply attach a Slider Control to an Offset component and you have something that moves.

animated Perlin noise

Linear movement is quite boring but we can also use Perlin Noise! Perlin noise would be perfect if only Filter Forge had enabled us control over that third dimension. But we can fake this by taking two Perlin Noises, offset them, and blend them.

easing

Easing time is also quite easy. We can feed our slider into Tone Curve (via Assemle HLS) and consequently map any Curve imaginable.

looping

For creating a loop we can map a Wave Curve for example. Note that this wave curve is actually a sine. So this is more or less a circular, one dimensional motion.

batch rendering

If you want to learn how to use the command line itself you can stop reading here: open Filter Forge, press help and search for command line renderer. There are two helper applications for pc (pc) and (mac ) with which you can easily create batch files.

mac

There is an application for Mac OS X that can be used to generate batch renderer control files and to control the batch renderer, it is called FFBatchMaster. By controlling which sliders that should change between frames, it can be used to create animations.

You can then use another app (there are many to choose from) to convert a list of images to a movie. GraphicConverter is a good choice.

pc

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creating a movie from images

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example filters

The best way to learn something is too see how others do it so here's a list of filters that are intended for animation:

• => Cartoon clouds on Youtube
• => Perlin clouds on Youtube
• => Mercury falling on Youtube
• (sorry, lost the filter, I'll create a new one) Fire fire on Youtube